SUSE will soon be the largest independent Linux company | Hacker News Reader

SUSE will soon be the largest independent Linux company

zdnet.com

55 pointsCrankyBear25 comments

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.

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).

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.

Isn't Canonical also operating at a loss even after it's massive success? I don't think I've seen anything definitive about it's success as a commercial offering, but I can say I rarely meet commercial Canonical consumers but I regularly meet commercial SUSE and RedHat customers.

If Canonical is sold, I doubt it would be for nearly as much as SUSE or RHEL. The general consensus seems to be that Ubuntu is for new users, while SUSE and RHEL are for serious customers, and that's far more important than most other features from an enterprise perspective (nobody ever got fired for choosing RHEL/SUSE).

And yeah, I also would be very interested in the paying install base.

Personally, I'm switching to SUSE because there's a supported path from Tumbleweed to SUSE, and Ubuntu has caused me far too much pain for me to trust them with my money and my business. Ubuntu just doesn't seem to know what it wants to be when it grows up, and that's a problem that SUSE and RHEL have solved long ago.

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.

Correction: XenServer 6.2 and earlier dom0 is CentOS 5.x based, however it's kernel is based on SLES kernel.

> 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.

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

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

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

IDK. I'm in the process of switching, and so far everything has been pretty smooth. I'm currently weaning myself off Arch, and honestly, OBS has been a sufficient replacement for the AUR, and Tumbleweed is reasonably nice to use. I'm also switching my servers from FreeBSD and Debian to Leap, and again, it's pretty smooth.

My only major fear is that BTRFS is going to eat my lunch, but it's also improving as well, so that's becoming less and less of a worry. I'm watching ZFS on Linux as well, but neither SUSE nor RedHat seem interested in jumping on the bandwagon, so I'm holding off.

openSUSE seems quite nice, and I agree with most of the decisions that they make. Honestly, I don't know why I didn't use it until now...

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

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

It's still April 1st somewhere.

> 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

This seems an odd comment to make, given that Slackware is still active :)

I actually meant to say they are the oldest lasting company around Linux, not distro.

And SUSEcon starts tomorrow in Nashville. Anyone else going?

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.

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