From the openSUSE news website:
The wait is over and a new era begins for openSUSE releases. Contributors, friends and fans can now download the first Linux hybrid distro openSUSE Leap 42.1. Since the last release, exactly one year ago, openSUSE transformed its development process to create an entirely new type of hybrid Linux distribution called openSUSE Leap.
Version 42.1 is the first version of openSUSE Leap that uses source from SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) providing a level of stability that will prove to be unmatched by other Linux distributions. Bonding community development and enterprise reliability provides more cohesion for the project and its contributor's maintenance updates. openSUSE Leap will benefit from the enterprise maintenance effort and will have some of the same packages and updates as SLE, which is different from previous openSUSE versions that created separate maintenance streams.
Community developers provide an equal level of contribution to Leap and upstream projects to the release, which bridges a gap between matured packages and newer packages found in openSUSE's other distribution Tumbleweed.
Since the move was such a shift from previous versions, a new version number and version naming strategy was adapted to reflect the change. The SLE sources come from SUSE's soon to be released SLE 12 Service Pack 1 (SP1). The naming strategy is SLE 12 SP1 or 12.1 + 30 = openSUSE Leap 42.1. Many have asked why 42, but SUSE and openSUSE have a tradition of starting big ideas with a four and two, a reference to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 05 2015, @05:35PM
Isn't that exactly what Ubuntu is? A long term support edition (Debian) with newer repositories added on top.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 05 2015, @10:14PM
Yup! But this one is new... And hybrid, must be green like the cars?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 06 2015, @01:42AM
Not gas/electric, more like a mule. Makes me wonder which it has more of: hybrid vigor, or hybrid sterility?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday November 06 2015, @12:12AM
Uhhhhh - no. Ubuntu is not Debian. Ubuntu is based on Debian, but it's not Debian. Linux Mint people understand that. They offer Mint, based on Ubuntu, and LMDE, based on Debian. I was an early adopter of Ubuntu, but I dropped it because it departs so far from what Debian is all about.