SUSE targets pre-summer IPO

That was that until it worked like a charm with better driver support (and a Debian based distro) a few years later.

But what to say about the manuals?

Those manuals and books included with the CDs, in the box.

For me they were a catalyst in my Linux learning.

Really good quality manuals, with reference tables, and covering many (many) topics. From the the graphical environment to the command line, from the administration of the local system, to network services, good structure, nice tips, cheatsheets, reference tables, even covering kernel compilation!

As you say, they did include everything needed, to live together with win98... tools, floppy images, etc... and the documentation about howto do it beforehand.

In that modem times, with low speed internet, the CDs where valuable, indeed.

But those books included in the box, for people like me in such times (self-taught beginner with Linux) those manuals were like gold!

Did use my first linux from a CD in a computers magazine.

Did play with redhat, and debian, then I did buy my first suse box with suse 6.0 (around 1999), and did buy again the box for suse 7 and 8.

Latter I did get faster internet, and did jump 100% to debian for everything. But I still have those manuals with my books.

The complete package (cds + books) is something that I remember fondly for how useful it was to me, and a lot of respect for the work of the people who made it.

I did not anticipate how much of an impact on my life that was going to have.

TL;DR - Go Suse! (-:

Is still fun! There is Tumbleweed, a full rolling distribution (all packages with its own update cadence, and OBS fully building the dependencies that are impacted). There is also MicroOS, a transactional OS (BtrFS subvolumes for rootfs are read-only, and the update happens in the snapshot that will be activated after the reboot, providing a self-healing system when an upgrade does not affect the running environment)

Also Leap, but this is indeed boring (15.3 will be based fully in SLE binaries)

I played a bit with Open SUSE on my home machine, I wouldn't use it a work simply because there aren't as many repos for the package mangager, for instance if you want to install kubeadm you would have to build from source.

In germany. It's quite widespread there in companies and public institutions. I prefer SLES over red hat/centos, but that, of course, is just a matter of personal taste.

Continental European enterprises.

Speak for yourself, my desktop is Linux now after more than a decade of Mac. (But I know what you mean: it never really gained huge traction.)

It's all the little things like bad window management (can't batch close from alt tab screen) to horrible UX (the new folder button hidden behind a hamburger menu) to idiotic naming (what do thunar and totem do?) and a good dose of not fixing the bugs that your users care about, that made Linux OS un-sellable.

I think the gaming -> PC building pipeline is getting people educated and interested in the nitty gritty of their home computers, plus there are more people exposed to Linux now than ever just through a giant and growing industry of software devs.

if you want a windows desktop, buy a windows license.

if you want linux to look like windows, well then yeah ... you're going to be disappointed.

The timing seems right, Redhat is now owned by IBM, so setting SuSE free to compete with Ubuntu and Redhat might be a smart move. Ubuntu is doing their own thing in many respects, and IBM pretty much removed RedHat from the stockmarket, and pissed of some people with CentOS. Those CentOS users need to look for a new distro.

Wouldn't surprise me if the US is actually their largest market.

SUSE is a large distribution based in Germany, in Europe they have significant inroads in government contracts.