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Comment by dana321 | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone care? Nightmare of a linux distro.. If someone says "lets use suse linux" run for the hills!!

While I'm not particularly a fan, it's important to make clear the company SUSE (that is, SUSE Linux GmbH) has two distributions. It funds the community-maintained openSUSE distribution, but also has SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES).

openSUSE has a regular ~2 year support window and is probably mostly used by enthusiasts. The commercial SLES product has a 10 year support window (with paid extension for another 3 years).

It's a paid product, but 10+ years of software updates for a stable Linux platform is something that's pretty rare to find, and certainty a great option for certain products. Hopefully I'm corrected on this, but RedHat tends to be the only other vendor supporting Linux distributions for such a long period of time?

Cannonical does 5 years for lts for everyone , likely more for enterprise customers

Shuttleworth announced in November 18.04 will receive 10 years of support as well.

This applies to Ubuntu Core only: https://www.ubuntu.com/core

Standard Ubuntu still has five years: https://www.ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle

Suse has been pushing btrfs, zypper and other neat tools forward for years. IBM/Toshiba's 4690 POS (used in all the Kroger stores, Fred Meyers, etc), Walmart's in house POS, OfficeMax/OfficeDepot and numerous others use Suse as a base for their point of sale system, deli scales, and other edge applications.

I'm relatively certain 4690 OS is a independent, proprietary OS or at least lacking the Linux kernel, which is pretty important.

IBM stopped development of 4690 OS in 2005, porting all their software to Suse. Toshiba bought the point of sale business from IBM in 2012, but any 4690 based installs are a legacy from the early 2000s, as SuperPOS ACE is what IBM (now Toshiba) has been pushing for the past decade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4690_Operating_System#4690

Yes, SUSE ("IBM IRES" in this case) is a completely different OS from 4690 and nothing on the wiki suggests otherwise.

From my experience it's been very reliable and yast has made admin changes very easy.

Yup. We use it as well. Quite reliable, easy to upgrade without issues (unlike Ubuntu), easy to configure with yast. I was missing some packages we use for deployment and backup and openSuSE build service came in handy for creating a custom repo. The only issues we had were with old HP hardware. LEAP 15 even has a system that lets you rollback updates but it only works with btrfs (uses fs snapshots) which we don't use out of caution.

Was my first distro too and yes, it was a nightmare. my personal favorite was the gui application to configure X11 and the graphics driver, every failure whould put you back into console sifting through xml configs.

but i've heard good things since.

  it was a nightmare

On some of my HP/Compaq laptops of the time, it was the only major distro that installed right out of the box.

Isn't/Didn't Suse use to be one of the big competitors of RedHat in the OS market for enterprises?

Still a big competitor, more popular in Europe. I managed several high performance clusters that ran on SLES.

It still is!

I don't see a problem with having more actively developed and supported distros to pick from.

It was my first distro when I picked up some installation CDs for it at Microcenter. I never had any issues.

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