openSUSE Leap 16. 1 lets users choose between a conventional Linux installation and an immutable system from the same installer, bringing the previously separate Leap Micro into the fold. It’s the first point release after Leap 16. 0, which we looked at last year when it reached the release candidate stage. Leap 16. 1 has arrived ahead of its paid enterprise sibling, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 16. 1, which is expected later this month. Its release notes are already available, and IBM discussed the release in September. The big change in the 16. 1 release cycle of both the free and commercial products is that SUSE is merging its conventional Linux with its immutable version, a change the company announced back in February . SUSE previously offered a commercial stripped-down immutable OS, aimed mainly at hosting containers, called SLE Micro . To correspond with that, there was a free community OS called Leap Micro – the final release was Leap Micro 6. 2 . Leap Micro is being discontinued as a separate community distribution. The Leap 16. 1 announcement says: "Immutable Mode with transactionally updating a system with a read-only root filesystem is a big change for this release. Users who know Leap Micro will recognize it right away, because it is the same approach, now integrated directly into Leap. Leap 16. 1 in Immutable Mode replaces Leap Micro, and there will be no Leap Micro 6. 3 or 7. 0. Users simply boot the regular Leap 16. 1 install image and select Immutable Mode in Agama." Both Red Hat and Canonical offer immutable distros, but both use different architectures from their conventional package-based distros. Ubuntu Core is built entirely from snap packages, while Red Hat’s "Atomic" immutable distros are built from bootable containers, running on top of OStree , which works a little like a local Git server. Immutable distros built on Arch, such as SteamOS 3 or KDE Linux, resemble ChromeOS at filesystem level, with dual root filesystems that update one another. Leap belongs to the openSUSE family of distros, backed by enterprise Linux vendor SUSE. Its commercial sibling is SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). Leap is the free, community-supported version, and they are based on the same core packages and release schedule. openSUSE also has a rolling-release version, called Tumbleweed . To rephrase this in terms of slightly more familiar Red Hat equivalents, SLES is SUSE’s equivalent of RHEL…