
SUSE to be acquired by EQT Partners - bitcharmer
https://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-project/2018-07/msg00000.html
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jonhendry18
Are EQT Partners the kind of private equity firm that tries to profit by
running profitable companies?

Or are they the kind of private equity firm that loads up its companies with
debt, pays itself massive dividends, and then lets the companies struggle and
die under unsustainable debt loads?

(See: Toys 'R Us, etc)

~~~
mongol
Were not familiar with them but as a Swede I thought to check their board to
see if I can recognise some names. And indeeds, it contain well known
industrialists. Such as:

Finn Rausing of Rausing family, who made a fortune on founding Tetrapak

Peter Wallenberg Jr. Wallenberg family is the most established "capitalist"
family in Sweden with historical ties far back and still significant stake in
companies such as Ericsson

Leif Östling, former CEO of Scania, now on the board of Volkswagen

~~~
njoro
Wallenberg is behind EQT and they aren't so much industrialists as crony
capitalists and oligarchs. They are the driving force behind, as well as one
of the main profiteers of, privatization in Sweden in recent years. Thomas von
Koch, the head of EQT, has said on national TV that he thinks Sweden should be
more like Singapore. Leif Östling most recently had to resign as head of the
main employers organization after revelations of tax planning and the Rausing
family isn't really a role model for anyone. So they are all pretty much
crooks.

I guess EQT mostly does what it says on the tin, restructure and sell
companies. If you ever wondered why so many people only have relatively
expensive cable internet in Sweden instead of being connected directly to
widely available fiber networks that is to a large extent because of EQT.

~~~
mongol
Quite personal opinions there. For anyone reading the thread, I definitely
would not call neither of them crooks.

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omeid2
Ironic that you don't argue against any of the points provided and dismiss the
criticism as "personal" by saying "[you] wouldn't call them crooks".

~~~
mongol
No point to argue. I just wish to show a differing opinion.

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syntaxing
How does something like this work when there are parts of the code that is
community driven. Do the volunteers get any share of the pie?

That being said, is there still a lot of people that use SUSE? I remember a
lot of people used to rave (particularly academic) about it due to it's
stability. I remember playing with their distro builder a couple of years ago
and you can choose the specific packages and settings to install which was
super neat.

~~~
v0lta
I use openSUSE Leap 15 as my daily driver.

Since I don't want to tinker every weekend with my distro anymore I need
something stable. openSUSE Leap, based on SLE, offers this. Additionally KDE
is a first-class citizen and just works as intended.

There's also a rolling release version, Tumbleweed, but I didn't try it yet.

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dkersten
> Since I don't want to tinker every weekend with my distro anymore

Do many people actually do this, though? A few years ago, I used Arch as my
main distro, and, besides the initial setup, almost never tinkered with it. I
would imagine that more approachable distros would be more tinker-free too.

~~~
morganvachon
It's true that the most approachable distros (SUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu and its
derivatives like Elementary OS) are more or less "tinker free" these days.

For those of us who still like to tinker while maintaining a stable base,
there are distros like Debian, Slackware, Void, and so on. And finally, for
those who consider Linux a hobby or pastime (or who are comfortable living on
the bleeding edge) there are projects like Arch, Neon, and Gentoo.

~~~
_emacsomancer_
I think I would group Arch with [Debian, Slackware, Void] rather than with
Gentoo (if we're restricted to those two groups).

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morganvachon
No, because Arch is a rolling release whereas you have to run Unstable and
-current respectively in Debian and Slackware to be closer to the bleeding
edge. But having said that, I should actually have put Void in with Arch and
Gentoo.

~~~
_emacsomancer_
But Gentoo is build-everything-from-source, which makes it rather different
from Arch or Void.

~~~
morganvachon
It doesn't have to be "build everything from source", they have installs based
on different stages. You can even do a binary only install if you wish. And it
is rolling, so it does fit in with Arch and Void in that sense.

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ram_rar
I used to have SUSE before, but nowadays its either RHEL or Ubuntu/debian. Its
such a shame that, there is barely any new players in the server os market.

~~~
alex_duf
I think it boils down to the fact that not that many innovations are coming
from the distribution itself. It used to be true, especially when it came to
recognizing hardware or simplifying install, but nowadays most hardware is
recognized and most distro's install is simple (except Arch, but I like arch,
so go figure).

I suppose the biggest innovation in the past few years have been in terms of
virtualization, and they were barely dependent on the distribution as most of
the work was done upstream on the linux Kernel.

So it's hard to be a newcomer and have strong selling points. Maybe the next
generation of kernel programmed in type safe, memory safe languages would be
interesting?

~~~
jason_slack
I had thought about trying to implement some sort of bindings around the
kernel to allow devs to use Go or Rust. Kotlin might not be bad either.

When I was learning via LFS I felt like there is still a lot of innovation
that can be done. I remember back in 2000 I attended a Linux World Expo and it
was amazing. It felt great to see all these companies dedicating resources to
making Linux better. Now, I don't feel like it is quite the same anymore.
There were companies inventing all sort of solutions from large scale server
management to desktop apps to, to, to. Companies gave out stuffed toys. I
still have a SUSE branded lizard, a Fedora and 5-6 more.

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kev009
Out of curiosity, are there any readers of this site that rune SUSE in prod?
My understanding is it is more of a force in the EU, I've known some desktop
users of it (good KDE integration), but I've never encountered it in my work
or job interviews etc in the US.

edit: ah there are a few anecdotes nested in this comments already.

~~~
djsumdog
I run openSUSE for my mail server, but that's in the process of being migrated
to OpenBSD.

When I worked at the University of Cincinnati in 2012, we had a lot of stuff
running on SLES, mostly because we were running Novel's Identity Management
system.

That was a while back though and I'm not sure if they're still down that route
since Novell turned into Micro Focus and, I guess now, EQT.

~~~
pknopf
Side question, for your mail server, do you ever find that your outbound
messages get sent to spam?

~~~
djsumdog
Dear god yes! I wrote a whole post on that bullshit:

[https://penguindreams.org/blog/how-google-and-microsoft-
made...](https://penguindreams.org/blog/how-google-and-microsoft-made-email-
unreliable/)

