I was delighted to see the news last week that the first stable release of openSUSE Leap for s390x has been officially published.
openSUSE community member Sarah Julia Kriesch fills in the details in a recent email to the Linux-390 ListServ:
"I am happy to announce that our first stable release of openSUSE Leap for s390x has been officially published yesterday.
You can receive openSUSE Leap 15.3 for IBM Z and LinuxONE on our download page:
https://get.opensuse.org/leap/
You can install openSUSE as a network installation and from an iso image build .
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Enjoy the new Linux distribution openSUSE Leap 15.3 for IBM Z and LinuxONE!
Our wiki page for the s390x port has been updated continuously with the latest news (incl. repositories) and our new planned tasks:
In a follow-up post Mark Post of SUSE provides some more background:
"This is the first version of Leap to be built from a combination of binary RPMs from SUSE Linux Enterprise, and binary RPMs built from the openSUSE source code base. In the past, the openSUSE team would use _source_ RPMs from SUSE Linux Enterprise to build their own binary packages from that. That is no longer the case.
So, unlike other community supported distributions, you'll have the core components taken directly from SUSE-built packages, combined with the huge amount of additional packages that openSUSE offers. All at no cost to you. For you hard core KDE aficionados out there, that means you can have your Linux/390 system running a KDE desktop, and not just the GNOME one that is available from SUSE Linux Enterprise.
Congratulations to Sarah and the openSUSE team! If you want to learn more, Sarah is also doing a presentation at the openSUSE Virtual Conference June 18-19th: openSUSE on the Mainframe: The Future of community distributions on IBM Z