
SUSE will soon be the largest independent Linux company - CrankyBear
https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-new-suse/
======
Twirrim
I was wondering "What about Canonical" but it looks like SUSE's annual revenue
is about 4 times that of Canonical, and of course SUSE requires a contract to
get patches etc. where Ubuntu doesn't.

I'd be curious what the difference in the install base is like.

~~~
metildaa
Considering Suse has Walmart, Kroger (and their QFC, Fred Meyer, etc
subsidiaries), Safeway/Albertsons, and numerous European & African chains
using SLES as the base of their retail systems, they likely sell many more
support contracts.

SLES has pushed deep onto back office computers and embedded devices like deli
scales, which ia a big stretch from where it started (as an IBM 4690 OS
replacement).

~~~
Barrin92
Yep suse is big in retail, IIRC they service about 70% of the top 100
retailers or something like that. Also the car industry seems to rely on suse
quite heavily, and I think the US defense and airforce use SLES as well.

------
terrywang
Personally, I admire the fact that openSUSE polishes KDE and GNOME (Xfce4 as
well) pretty well, satisfying details, really makes the effort to make the
distro more user friendly and easy to use. However, I wouldn't use it as
personal workstation distro (I currently run Arch Linux and Fedora 29, I
wouldn't mind running Manjaro, Kubuntu/Xubuntu or Debian).

I have been under the impression that SUSE has kept changing ownership since
Novel took over (then Attachmate, merger with Micro Focus, now sold), never
settled, it's simply a a risk to many businesses running Linux with commercial
support.

During my tenure with Citrix (XenServer team), the product team made a big
decision to switch dom0 (not just the kernel) from SLES 11 (I could be wrong
about the release) to CentOS 7, which I personally thought was the right move.
Don't want to talk about XenServer rebrand and what happened to the free
edition here (simply search xcp-ng as alternative).

NOTE: In the past 11 years working in Australia, I have never seen a single
production system running on SLES (I've seen Gentoo though). Above doesn't
mean openSUSE/SLES isn't a great Linux distro.

~~~
Vogtinator
> I have been under the impression that SUSE has kept changing ownership since
> Novel took over (then Attachmate, merger with Micro Focus, now sold), never
> settled, it's simply a a risk to many businesses running Linux with
> commercial support.

Absolutely not - this just proves that there's no commercial risk involved.
Red Hat was recently bought as well, which unlike the SUSE sale might actually
have an impact on the company.

~~~
terrywang
Those decision makers (sign the POs) normally don't have insight into the IT
industry ;-)

------
externalreality
Its good to see the brand reemerge. For a while there I thought they were
done.

~~~
sarcasmatwork
Do you use SLES? Because I do everyday and its garbage. SLES 15 is a shit
show... Rather use RHEL any day before SLES.

~~~
tannhaeuser
What's the problem specifically? When I had to check it out recently as a
customer wanted to move to MariaDB I didn't find info about support for the
older 5.7 version which is the last version identical to MySQL, and which
would be helpful as an option to have for pinpointing errors.

I wish they'd produce a systemd-less version like Devuan.

~~~
externalreality
> I wish they'd produce a systemd-less version like Devuan.

I've been hearing similar often. What's the beef with Systemd anyway? I've
haven't heard much and Googling will surely just turn up a bunch of
theoretical, philosophical, or hate posts. Why is Systemd bad from the
perspective of a regular user.

~~~
tannhaeuser
I takes over so much of regular infrastructure - starting and stopping
deamons, logging (writing log entries into binary files only systemd itself
can read), login, time synchronization, network setup, and an ever-increasing
number of unrelated tasks remotely associated with managing computers.

Some of us like the Unix way where things are predictable and composed of
small, transparently-working programs that do one thing, and do it well.
Nothing that systemd solves is worth abandoning established ways of system
automation and follow Poettering's (author of systemd) vision instead. Systemd
in its entirety is approaching the size of the Linux kernel itself. If I
wanted that kind of monolith, I'd be running Windows, or AIX (where ironically
Linux is heading with RedHat being bought by IBM). Have fun with IBM Tivoli
SystemD cluster manager some ten years down the road.

------
dTal
Why do people seem to give SUSE the cold shoulder? I haven't tried it (see?)
but I've never really heard anything bad about it. A quick poke suggests the
software packaging situation for it is excellent as well.

~~~
SamReidHughes
Every time I've tried to use it, as a desktop, it just wasn't great. Edit: let
me clarify. It just didn't work great out of the box. Maybe it was hardware
problems, or general weirdness and brokenness, but it felt "off".

~~~
blablabla123
When I started with Linux, the first few years I used SuSE. At that time it
was quite normal that a lot of tweaking was needed to get things running. But
later on when the landscape modernized, it was noticable that SuSE uses a lot
of custom solutions. For instance the /opt directory used to be more in use,
likewise a lot of configuration was done via YaST instead of /etc or standard
tools that can access /etc.

So when bugs appear one needs to wait for SuSE to fix them or work around
them. Ubuntu did a much more standard approach, they have (like Debian of
course) less customizations in place making users profit from both upstream
and 3rd party packages without SuSE focus.

Anyways, other distributions don't seem to have a tool like YaST which does
_all_ the system configuration and has both proper shell and UI integrations.
Also KDE feels more natural on SuSE I guess.

------
ilovecaching
I'm also pretty sure that SUSE is currently oldest active distro as well, it's
based on Slackware.

~~~
amdavidson
Genuinely don't see how an RPM based distro is based on slackware... What am i
missing?

~~~
diffeomorphism
> In 1994, with help from Patrick Volkerding, Slackware scripts were
> translated into German, which was marked as the first release of S.u.S.E.
> Linux 1.0 distribution. It was available first on floppies, and then on CDs.

RPM was first released in 1997.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUSE_Linux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUSE_Linux)

------
ewams
And SUSEcon starts tomorrow in Nashville. Anyone else going?

------
etaerc
And they fail so much it is painful to watch. Strangely in capitalism the fit
will sell themselves when able to get a really sweet deal. But the unfit will
"survive" in some sense as "independent" units.

