It was released after community pushback on 15.5 being the last.

Then they are now calling something Leap 16, but it hasnt much tot do with Leap: https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/17/opensuse_confirms_lea...

It seems that SUSE wants to shift its enterprise offering to ALP (adaptable linux platform) instead of the legacy SLE platform to better support modern workloads. https://www.suse.com/c/suse-salp-raises-the-bar-on-confident...

it makes sense to then also shift the open source stream in that direction, which is happening with Leap 16.

It was announced after the end of Leap was proclaimed, again feeding suspicion that Leap 16 is meant to save some goodwill rather than part of a solid plan of supporting users.

It all looks opportunistic, the total opposite of what users of such distros expect. You can built out your use of it at your peril.

That's my article, FWIW.

I got a lot of unhappy feedback from SUSE for it, but they did not deliver solid tech info I asked for, even given 2 days to do so.

TL;DR summary: they're focussing on immutable distros now, but unlike rival efforts such as Endless (Debian + OStree) or immutable Fedora (OStree all the way down) or Ubuntu Core (Snap all the way down), SUSE implemented transactional packaging using Btrfs snapshots and plain old RPM.

So, underneath, it's structured pretty much the same as conventional SUSE. That means you can turn the immutability function off, if desired, and be left with something quite conventional.