Suse is once again an independent company
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
They left us mostly alone, and most things actually turned to the better. Maybe not having to answer to thousands of shareholders gave management the possibility to implement some needed changes. One example was a new salary/bonus/retirement structure giving a huge boost to most of us. So YMMV.
In this economic climate and especially outside of the US, PE gives you a lot of the benefits of going public without the extra scrutiny and reporting. I've seen several established companies in my industry forgo going public and unlock liquidity via private equity or sovereign wealth funds.
Suse basically fell off my radar a decade ago, I thought the next announcement I was going to hear about them was going bankrupt and being sold off for parts. Guess they've been super quiet achievers and have managed to accrue an Annual Revenue of 300M that I've somehow missed behind the release/announcements of flashier distros, but here we are with news of a 2.5B acquisition - congratz to the team.
Based on this expertise, the only real competitor in their business is Red Hat.
In my country (Denmark), most enterprise runs Redhat, but my personal opinion is that Suse would make more sense after the IBM purchase, especially for public sector usage.
IBM is my first employer and while my inside impression has been great, I'm wondering what the danish view from outside is!
That’s not what I meant though, IBM is an American company, that holds inherent problems for the European public sector. Basically I think we should bet on our own, because recent years have shown us that we may not always have a great political relationship with the US. I think it’s highly unlikely that we’ll have a bad relationship with the US, but it’s a risk assessment we need to think about when we enter into multi-million or billion dollar decade long contracts.
IBM happily helped Hitler plan the Holocaust during World War II. Not even war could stop them from making a buck, so I doubt Trump's shenanigans would.
Indeed, I think that RedHat & SuSe are very similar in their ideas and in their usage patterns. Both contribute quite a bit to upstream projects (there is a lot of work being done on CNCF-stuff in both places, both are RPM-based and both offer a number of different "tracks" depending on your needs). openSUSE also has been very good at keeping up with things that are in development.
On the desktop-side, I think openSUSE is actually nicer, since they officially support a myriad of DEs (notably both Gnome and KDE).
For what it's worth, I use (and have been) using openSUSE both on my work laptop and my private laptop as my daily driver, and I use openSUSE on various private projects as a server OS, though I'm using CentOS 7 at work for all our servers because some of the software we use only supports Ubuntu LTS and CentOS (because the vendor is incapable of building non-idiotic RPMs/DEBs...).
For years, Suse was the de-facto reference implementation of KDE, where it was the primary desktop. I believe this changed after the Novell acquisition (but it’s been so long, I might misremember), and KDE had to find other ways to get an equivalent “showcase” distro.
Unfortunately, that legacy remains with us today, and SUSE is not very friendly to KDE for the enterprise, which I think is really a shame.
Suse has SLES and IBM has RHEL. I am not in the position to compare them.
The non-paid variants are OpenSUSE vs. CentOS. One big difference there is the support life. CentOS 6 with an ancient 2.6.32 kernel and upstart came out 2011 and is still supported. OpenSUSE releases are supported ~ 1.5 years. There are different opinions whether upgrading from one OpenSUSE release to the next one should be done or not. I typically prefer new installations because they result in cleaner systems. But I also upgraded once an it was painless.
LEAP is exactly the same package versions as in the newest SLES I believe. I would expect them often to be a bit older package versions than Fedora, but I haven't compared recently.
Tumbleweed is a leading/bleeding edge rolling release distro. The closest equivalent is Fedora Rawhide.
This despite SLES' controversial and never-working-quite-right "vm.pagecache_limit_mb" kernel parameter (which they're finally ditching in SLES15, I hear).
Don't get me wrong, SLES these days is a mature, high-quality distro (I'm working with hundreds of installations running SAP products), but sometimes they do weird things, like bumping kernel version from 2.6 to 3.0 within one service pack (sometimes back in SLES10 or SLES11 days, iirc).
>As already mentioned several times, there are no special landmark features or incompatibilities related to the version number change, it's simply a way to drop an inconvenient numbering system in honor of twenty years of Linux.
Congratulations, SuSe!
Edit: The title seems to be a little mischaracterizing, SUSE themselves call it a "Sale to EQT". But I suppose there is no other possibility.
If it were a tech company buying them, the assumption would be that the buyer would try to digest Suse and incorporate its components into the parent.
I think they're biggest handicap is they're not from the US and while i worked there people acknowledge they have horrible marketing. Also being bought and sold a few times doesn't help, and with the HPE acquisition a few years back, a lot of employees (on HPE side) simply left.
The kubic project has developed the only viable alternative to CoreOS that's being phased out. Unfortunately where MicroOS falls short is SUSE's stubbornness for using BtrFS, which causes a lot of headaches and has been dropped from all major distros at this point. People in the kubic project have also been contributors to kubernetes, kubeadm, OCI, (they even contributed a lot of code to podman, from Red Hat) and they've been a significant driving force for rootless containers https://rootlesscontaine.rs/. It's weird they're not more often in the limelight with all the hard work they do, but maybe they'll take this opportunity to fix their marketing and steer into a better direction :).
The team behind is really smart, and doing good work - it just needed a forceful vision imposed on it for it to go somewhere.
It even allows you to boot the system into one of these previous snapshots.
Still going to hunt down an early Slackware ISO and might try the first versions of Fedora and Ubuntu again.
https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/
The ISOs on that mirror go back to 12.0 but you can roll your own using the older releases.
History of Jurix: http://linux2.mathematik.tu-darmstadt.de/pub/linux/distribut...
SUSE had a stronghold in the nineties in Europe. E.g. here in The Netherlands, many bookshops would cary SUSE Linux boxes.
I sometimes use the Package Management part of it, since searching for something is sometimes quite nice in it. That said, I don't use it for installing software or doing updates etc., so you can absolutely use e.g. zypper & YaST side-by-side.
Azure officially supports a number of distributions. The risk of alienating the existing partners who package these distributions for Azure likely outweighs the small benefit Microsoft would get from acquiring Canonical. A deep partnership already exists (e.g. Ubuntu Advantage integration throughout Azure). They don't need to own Canonical for that.
Windows the OS is gonna die sooner or later, it's a question of time. Windows the legacy application API layer is probably gonna stick around forever.
Linux kernel + proprietary Windows application compatibility secret sauce seems like a killer combination. (Think Wine, except easy to use and actually working, and commercial.)
I think the only thing stopping Microsoft from following this plan is legacy devs and managers having a vested interest to keep their jobs around.
I don't think Windows will die anytime soon. Yes, the traditional Windows desktop will die eventually. This is why Microsoft probably makes such a strong play with Azure and Office 365. But Microsoft can just continue to sell Windows + Blink-based Edge as a modern desktop for web apps that also has support for legacy win32 applications for those companies and individuals that need it.
Building a compat layer on top of Linux seems to make little sense. It will be a huge time investment and while desktop Linux is great for developers, the whole ecosystem is to volatile for most end users. Plus the Linux graphics stack is still not where it needs to be.
Whether they'll acquire a Linux distributor is a completely separate question for me. I think it makes sense to acquire know-how and some influence for Linux on Azure. On the other hand, maybe they don't want to upset other Linux vendors. Oracle, Red Hat, and SUSE are typically used on expensive SAP/Oracle deployments. In fact, they were even SUSE resellers one day ;) [1].
[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2532632/microsoft-to-b...
I've seen this parroted before, no evidence to support this opinion.
Cloud Native products literally do not care for RHEL/SuSE and the like for a rather large portion but just give you Ubuntu. Also, paid support is given in combo with Ubuntu. Paid support: big business.
This one is great as well https://youtu.be/b0tsZB_LEQk
Just press the speaker button on the left-hand side.
It was an almost legitimate question.
Their technical support is wonderful and they truly deserve to be the most deployed GNU/Linux distribution in the enterprise. I hope they succeed in stamping out redhat because they have a superior product with far more competent engineering and support.
Aside from SAP, another user that most people wouldn't be too aware of was VMware. Before they created Photon OS, they used SUSE Linux Enterprise for their vCenter appliances. They've been long-time SUSE customers.
In addition to that, a large chunk of point-of-sale systems are built using SUSE Linux Enterprise customized JeOS ("Just enough Operating System") appliance systems.
I think this is likely to be just fine.
(Note, not a SUSE employee, this is just based on my spelunking and research.. ;) )
You buy licenses, renew them yearly. With various levels of premium support to select from.
Subscriptions give you access to different level of support, and access to updates.
"Strong players"? What quantitative evidence exists demonstrating that SuSE has any more than a marginal and insignificant share of server or desktop installs?
"Not that surprising, SLE POS is one of SUSE's best selling products
For example, in the states, 70% of Fortune 100 merchandisers, speciality retailers, and food and drug stores use it
Including a few big names like Walmart"
https://www.reddit.com/r/openSUSE/comments/b1cvdj/spotted_at...
Its journalistic verbiage, what do you want them say? Ultimately its been bought for $2.5billion, if it were a startup it would be a unicorn, it seems to be moving forward, what more do you want.
There are probably many companies that have changed hands that many times also.
There is some more data in this article: https://fosspost.org/analytics/insights-on-redhat-suse-the-m...
Interestingly it claims 750 employees for SuSE in 2016; perhaps the business entity sold today includes some departments that were elsewhere in the org-chart in 2016?
They also work on building a platform for trivially deploying and scaling Kubernetes within openSUSE as Kubic[1]. SUSE has a variant of this as the SUSE CaaS platform[2] ("container as a service" platform) product. Kubic is analogous to Fedora CoreOS[3], while CaaSP is similar to RHEL CoreOS that's part of OpenShift[4].
[1]: https://kubic.opensuse.org/
[2]: https://www.suse.com/products/caas-platform/
[3]: https://coreos.fedoraproject.org/
[4]: https://blog.openshift.com/openshift-4-install-experience/
* Continued upstream development of core system software.
* A host system that is stable and up-to-date (which you need to run your container manager).
* Container images which have up-to-date software, timely security patches, and reasonable security policies.
Distributions are the only members of the ecosystem which actually solve these problems in any meaningful way. It's a shame that we seem to be boring (or even vestigial) at this point despite all of this new software still requiring our work in order to actually run.
While I haven't used Suse for a while in personal projects, Suse is basically the only alternative to Red Hat enterprises have for running Linux with support for 10 years or more from a company deeply involved in kernel development. A pen testing study recently (can't find the link atm) reported that only RHEL and SLES had properly setup ASLR, selinux/AppArmor and other security features.
When Red Hat is fully absorbed into IBM, there might be many customers not willing to make deals with IBM, so I'm guessing the investor sees serious growth for Suse's enterprise support business.
Now if only they shipped a distro without systemd and more POSIXly ...
One of those operating systems is SUSE Linux.
I still find places in the UK that run it but it’s less common now than it used to be.
I completely disagree with your point that anything not based in apt is horrible to work with.
I get the impression that people using Debian and their derivatives seem to live under a rock regarding other distributions.
I would trust zypper dup hundred times over apt-get dist-upgrade. This gets amplified by the fact that openSUSE Tumbleweed (rolling distro), is much better auto-tested before being published every week, than my experience with sid was (tested by their end-users).
Today's Redhat dnf package manager is based on SUSE's dependency solver (https://github.com/openSUSE/libsolv), and both package managers provide a very nice user experience.
People seem to be still confused about SUSE "using YaST". YaST is just a front-end powered by libzypp (https://github.com/openSUSE/libzypp), like zypper is.
I'd never heard of Portage. Google indicates that it's Gentoo's package manager. It may be fantastic, but Gentoo is a hobby OS. Companies aren't going to use Gentoo. I'm not going to use Gentoo, because any benefits it has are going to be minimal, and it's never going to help my career.
There's a vast array of software out there that might be great for specific purposes, but I'm not going to swim upstream. So, while Gentoo and Portage may be fantastic, they're simply not on my radar, and certainly not on the radar of anyone I may work for.
I'm not disagreeing with you; we're just talking about completely different worlds at this point.
>So, while Gentoo and Portage may be fantastic, they're simply not on my radar, and certainly not on the radar of anyone I may work for.
Google's Chrome OS is a Gentoo fork.
Portage is not nightmare. Can apt run multiple unrelated installs in parallel?
In my experience pacman, APK, OpenBSD's ports and packages, and Slackware's pkgtools are all as good as or better than apt in various ways, with the caveat that Slackware doesn't do dependency resolution, which most Slackware users actually see as an advantage.
To put it another way, there is no perfect package manager, there is only the tool that works best for you. The above tools are what I feel to be the superior package management schemes in no particular order; apt has left me hanging way too many times to be comfortable with it on a production machine. For others (like you) the opposite may be true. Regardless, your statement only applies to you and shouldn't be presented as the gospel truth.