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.
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.
The problem is that many people hear small business and assume it's like 1-10 employees, but really small business is anything up to ~500 employees and millions in revenue.
It's not just SUSE. It's almost everyone in the industry. No one wants to talk to you unless you can spend $5-10k per year and that just doesn't work for small owner operated businesses.
The thing people don't realize is that it's not just one company like SUSE that won't sell you anything unless you can spend $2500 / year, it's everyone with their hand out asking for a few thousand dollars.
There are several places where I could justify $100 to keep a single Linux VM running for a year, but $2500 is never going to happen. I don't expect anyone to provide support, but why not sell me access for one machine for $100?
I think the article is more like "SUSE Offers Lifeline to CentOS Users with 100+ Servers".
I’m talking about small owner operated businesses. A lot of them will compete with owner absent franchises that are set up to make $30-50k per year. So the owner can draw that, plus the salary of one employee. Often that puts their salary around $100k.
$2500 is what a lot of them would be looking to spend on a firewall, switch, and AP (total) which would have a 5 year lifecycle. They’ll have one or two VMs on a single server. So it ends up being $2500 for a single “server” (VM) if they need Linux for something.
The tech industry is out of touch with the small business world and it’s getting worse.
That's probably not a good example. The odds of an tow-truck owner/operator needing to setup a linux server is pretty low. I exited the tech industry and now run a handyman service and even I probably wouldn't pay those fees.
Actually, why would it be low? Dispatch? Accounting? Automatically handling invoices?
There's plenty of reasons why a tow-truck company may want a server.
Regardless, clearly I was talking about a tow-truck company buying a tow-truck and not a server, as I was trying to convey that the dollar amount isn't obscene for a small business to handle.
As I am sure you're aware from your stated field of work that far more money than $2.5k is going into tools & such.
Nothing with regards to my comment was to suggest that the service one would be paying for here is worth that money. Maybe it is or isn't, that not I was commenting on.
It is purely that X amount of money was not unreasonable for a small business to expect to expense.
A lot of businesses are stuck with old systems they can't "just" update to a new OS version because everyone who knew why the system exists and what weird quirks it has, has long left the company. Alma 9 comes with ABI-incompatible upgrades to postgres/java/mysql/libc/literally every library you could possibly depend on, which is rough on in-house software that nobody wants to fund ongoing maintenance for.
It just tends to hit RHEL/CentOS harder than other distros because they're considered "enterprise" and thus get used more by the sort of dysfunctional companies who manage themselves into dead ends.
The whole point is wanting to shift the support burden to the distro provider. They have to maintain a consistent environment while also upgrading the security and hardware compatibility. That gives you those advantages without having to update your application.
I agree that people should be moving on from CentOS 7 by now and also agree that Alma is a great target. Alma is shooting for binary compatibility with RHEL without just blindly recompiling the RHEL sources. They start with CentOS Stream just like RHEL does.
CentOS went from being a “bug for bug” clone of RHEL to being upstream of RHEL ( the place RHEL gets branched from ).
That means you can no longer use CentOS as a 100% clone of RHEL that allows you to avoid paying for RHEL if what you need is exactly RHEL.
CentOS Stream is still available and still does everything RHEL does ( more really since the software will be newer ) but no longer guarantees bug-for-bug compatibility with RHEL. So it is a real alternative if you just want the functionality but not an option if what you really require is guaranteed compatibility.
SUSE is offering a 100% bug-for-bug RHEL compatible distro along with commercial support. It costs $25 per server with a $2500 minimum spend.
Yes!
> with a minimum $2,500 investment required
Noooo! Why does it always seem like the tech industry hates small businesses?