Enterprise Linux products are a great way to add both system stability and peace of mind to any production system: knowing you have an experienced engineering team with a contractual obligation to solve your problem goes a long way towards making sure you have fewer headaches.

Unfortunately, enterprise Linux systems don't make great development systems; they tend to have older (albiet secure and well-patched) libraries and development stacks, and userspace tools are, at best, an afterthought. Linux developers are often trapped in the gap, having to decide whether to make their development system match production, at the expense of an older, less feature-rich desktop experience, or to use a modern desktop Linux distribution, and risk issues that arise from building on a mismatched development stack...

... until openSUSE Leap arrived.