The relationship between SUSE and the openSUSE project is comparable to that of Red Hat and Fedora. SUSE, with its range of enterprise Linux tools, is the commercial backer, among other sponsors.

The picture is complicated by the fact that there are two different openSUSE distributions: Leap and Tumbleweed. Tumbleweed is a rolling-release distro, akin to Arch Linux; there's no stable version, and new packages emerge from the project's Factory every day.

In contrast, Leap is one of the most stable distros available. Major releases appear approximately every few years, with a new minor or point release annually. Since the last point release, 15.3, the project has synchronized its codebase with the enterprise distro. This makes it possible to migrate an installation of openSUSE Leap to the paid SLE product and receive commercial support.

As such, openSUSE Leap is more conservative technically, in part because it has a common codebase with a slow-moving enterprise distro. So while Ubuntu's latest LTS release has GNOME 42 and kernel 5.15, the latest Leap has GNOME 41 and kernel 5.14. Although SUSE Linux Enterprise does focus on servers, there is a desktop edition – but openSUSE Leap has a much broader selection of components.

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