SUSE announces Liberty Linux, new distro for those who miss the old CentOS | Hacker News Reader

SUSE announces Liberty Linux, new distro for those who miss the old CentOS

theregister.com

117 pointslproven54 comments

I used to use Tumbleweed and can't say nothing bad, very solid system. Also remember many high-note IRC public discussions with one SUSE high rank employee :)

They deserve to be more popular, probably marketing & sales teams ain't good enough. This Centos clone after 6 months seems like another failure. Enough clones, go ship some killer-features.

My experience was that their sales and marketing were amongst the sleaziest in the industry. Perhaps their commercial reputation precedes them?

>They deserve to be more popular, probably marketing & sales teams ain't good enough.

Man, I love OpenSUSE, with Tumbleweed being my go-to distro, but in general, German software companies, absolutely suck at successfully marketing/selling their stuff on he international stage, with SAP probably being the only notable exception.

They're good at capturing the conservative local corporate market, who usually prefers to "buy local" anyway, but they never seem to understand that the same German practices just don't work on the international tech stage that's more tuned to the Anglo-sphere way, especially in the consumer space.

As a counter example, Dutch and Scandinavian tech companies seem to be way better at competing in the international race and gaining international adoption, than German tech companies.

Maybe it would help if they would be less conservative and more open minded to new things, like the Scandinavians, but seeing as living in Germany still involves sending letters and faxes to open/close contracts, using cash, while fast, cheap fiber internet is still a pipe-dream, I doubt things are changing too soon over there to make Germany a software juggernaut.

At least they make solid luxury cars that don't immediately fall apart. :)

German engineering is good because it is conservative without losing a forward gaze. You see these effects socially and you lament that it isn't something else (from the examples, the ideals that the US like to espouse), but it wouldn't be what it was then. As a whole, it is what produces the OS you like.

Which Dutch tech companies are those? None maintain Linux distros AFAIK.

After a decade of Ubuntu I spend 2021 distrohopping, and found my new home at Opensuse. Tumbleweed really is the bleeding edge without the blood for me. Leap is an excellent choice for more appliancy machines.

Headline doesn't seem to give full picture. From https://www.suse.com/c/suse-liberty-linux/:

>SUSE Liberty Linux is a new technology and support offering that provides customers a unified support experience for managing their heterogeneous IT environments. With SUSE Liberty Linux, you get trusted support with optional proven management tools that are optimized for mixed Linux environments, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and as you would expect openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

But is this actually a new distro? Take a look at their product page: https://www.suse.com/products/suse-liberty-linux/ Besides the name, it reads like a support offering paired with patching/automation tooling. Also, doesn't this offering prove there isn't vendor lock-in? Sounds like marketing FUD.

>Also, doesn't this offering prove there isn't vendor lock-in?

It's non-trivial to build a RHEL clone in a way that doesn't infringe on RHEL trademarks and still has timely delivery of security patches, etc. Centos did that, and was broadly used. RedHat acquired Centos in 2014. Then more recently, they completely changed what CentOS was (clone of current/stable RHEL) into a development branch that was ahead of RHEL. That's a different thing, that would serve a different purpose...they effectively killed the product.

I think it is new, and is a lever against RHEL lock-in. Though yes, the linked story is the marketing view of that.

I don't disagree with anything you said, but my take on their lock-in argument is they're saying that once you install RHEL, and pay for the support from Red Hat, you are stuck with it. It is very easy to stop paying for support and attach your existing RHEL servers to other repos. That's what the use case of Liberty Linux seems to be: stop paying RH, keep your existing RHEL servers, pay us instead. It really can be that easy hence my argument that there isn't lock-in. But frankly the only reason we're having this discussion is because SUSE's marketing and description for this product is way too vague and possibly misleading.

> That's what the use case of Liberty Linux seems to be: stop paying RH, keep your existing RHEL servers, pay us instead.

No, I don't think so. If a company is a happy RHEL customer, why would they switch?

I think the targets are:

* CentOS Linux users who are upset that CentOS Linux was prematurely EOLed and don't want to pay RH as a result. Or pay Oracle, come to that.

* Companies with a mix of CentOS Linux, maybe some RHEL, and some SUSE, for whom this gives them a choice of moving to all-SUSE distros rather than all-RHEL distros.

* SLE customers who need some RHEL-compatible boxes for some stuff that only supports RHEL and RHEL clones, who can now keep it inside the SUSE family.

This is good news, I suppose. But why should users trust SUSE to maintain a free RHEL clone for the long term when Red Hat came to the conclusion it was bad business. Once bitten, twice shy.

Suse isn’t owned by a large consulting/marketing firm (IBM). Tech and specifically Linux support is central to their business case.

[Article author here]

True. Although IBM has sold off a lot of its consulting business, you know.

https://newsroom.ibm.com/2021-11-03-IBM-Completes-the-Separa...

Someone who’s worked with lots of marketing professionals here, of course the marketing professionals have sold a ton!

SUSE is owned, through various companies, the Wallenberg Family nowadays, isn't it?

EQT, a private holding firm, per google. Private and holding are doing a lot of work in that sentence.

SUSE is a public company, now. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SUSE.DE?p=SUSE.DE&.tsrc=fin-...

Welp, judge them by their actions.

To my understanding suse has offered CentOS maintenance for along time already, in a package to migrate you over to SUSE Linux Enterprise. and the service level agreements only apply for customers, as in paying customers.

So it's _customers_ who can trust it.

Because SuSE has already been doing this for longer than CentOS has been around. It's just SuSE isn't a big name in America, it's used more in Europe (and often typically mainland Europe too).

Their distros are usually pretty solid too.

AFAIK is mostly used in Germany, where SuSe has a strong take due to the average german person strongly preferring german-native stuff.

It looks like a cultural to me, in many times when I have interacted with people from Germany in a business context it just seemed that they are perfectly capable of speaking english but they just don't want to.

> it just seemed that they are perfectly capable of speaking english but they just don't want to

Due to the similarity of German and English, German speakers can superficially appear far more competent in English than they actually are. (This goes both ways.) Speakers of both languages come to the other with about half of the grammar (including hard bits that usually betray non-natives like irregular verbs by vowel umlaut) and a large collection of basic Germanic roots.

I'm always amused when watching a German film how entire sentences sometimes are decoded by my brain as English, when they're German.

But this completely breaks down once you go beyond "Ich habe all das Bier getrunken". German never got all the French-Latin vocabulary. Most technical and literary terms are completely different. They may feel quite ill-at-ease in English even though they sound reasonably fluent with the basics.

As a German native speaker, I like to break German-as-a-foreign-language speakers brains with delayed verbs.

Sadly, this style also makes my English bad^^

We also use LEAP on most of our servers. It's rock solid. I prefer it to Ubuntu after they snap-ed everything. Newer packages, seamless upgrades. Not so many packages though. We're still using Ubuntu 18 on development workstations, but that could probably change the second SuSE decides to offer >2yr free tier support.

Red Hat came to the conclusion it was bad business.- Is this really why they chose to do it? Streams make more sense with the modern environment. Fedora is upstream, then centos then RHEL. RH is doing a stepped approach which makes sense because no one can remember all domains and forsee all problems. -Bad business is what Microsoft is doing by dumping broken patches on end users to test in production after MS liquidated their QA testers.

I feel like the only sysadmin in the world who was fine with the idea of CentOS Stream, switched my servers seamlessly, and have had zero issues or concerns since.

Past performance is no guarantee of future performance. Some environments simply can't live with that risk.

If an org has that kind of risk, shouldn't they be paying for their OS?

CentOS Stream is just a hair’s breadth from as stable as CentOS ever was… anyone who wants to quibble with the size of the hair should just buy RHEL.

CentOS Stream's last podman major version update broke 70% of my company's infrastructure, affecting 120+ employees and our customers. It was a bug that couldn't be fixed without reverting the version, but we had to revert the whole update because all kinds of dependencies also got updated. We switched to Rocky the next day, on all VMs, and haven't had trouble since. We never had trouble with the original Centos (7 and 8).

70% of your company’s infrastructure and the productivity of 120+ people relied on a server OS without so much as a support contract? Seems risky, indeed.

You're going to have this problem with the next EL point release anyway, because the only thing CentOS Stream does is give it to you earlier...

SuSE was based from Slackware and then it was an RPM distro.

I think SuSE working on top of RH would make a lot of sense. Yast and SuSE tools should be a repo for a RHEL rebase.

I don't quite get it, is the base SuSE or RHEL? I've always liked SuSE so we will see what will come out of this.

The article says that it's RH userland with an RH-compatible kernel built from SUSE sources:

> All of the userland of the new distro will be built from Red Hat's official Source RPMs (SRPMs), with the exception of the kernel. That comes from SUSE's own SLE enterprise distribution, currently on version 15 SP3, but compiled using a Red Hat-compatible configuration.

Wonder what the particular reason for this is. If you're compiling from RH sources, might as well keep the kernel, no? I'm sure for some compatibility with it is important.

I don't get it why they are not taking the kernel also. To me this seems like a potential conflict/maintenance nightmare. You will have to keep an eye out on all RHEL package updates and SuSE kernel updates.

Long term release kernels are a maintenance nightmare, and have barely any difference in functionality. The maintenance burden of having 1 is already very huge, I don't see why they would add 1 more if what they have already works

is rpm vs deb distros still a thing? I haven't used a SUSE OS in quite some time.

The package format only really matters to packagers anymore I think. RHEL and SUSE are both RPM based though. The difference which matters to users is the package manager on top, which for RHEL is dnf (formerly yum) and on SUSE it's zypper. They're both competent package managers in my opinion.

I'm confused by what this actually is. When you read the official Suse pages [1] [2] it almost sounds like it is support for various distros not an actual distro.

>Running and maintaining a heterogeneous OS environment is hard; but your diverse workloads depend on it. With SUSE Liberty Linux, you get a world-class support and management solution for your entire Linux estate – from the core to the cloud and all the way to the edge – with no vendor lock-in

[1] https://www.suse.com/products/suse-liberty-linux/

[2] https://www.suse.com/c/suse-liberty-linux/

openSUSE Leap

openSUSE Tumbleweed

openSUSE MicroOS

openSUSE Kubic

Ranger/SUSE K3os

SUSE EnterpriseLinux

SUSE Liberty Linux

...a bit too much no?

BTW: The name is horrible...hell, even "Pop OS" is better

Except it's not "Pop OS". It's "Pop!_OS".

Pop#!/bin/OS would have been easier to memorize ;)

Has anyone at Sysytem76 ever explained the genesis of this awful name? I really like Pop!_OS, but the name is just terrible.

Maybe it is meant to be wahrholesque?

I mean in reality it's just a name, and the short version "pop" is a good name. But I guess the background story would be interesting anyhow.

Why?

Tumbleweed is the rolling baseline.

SLES is the major release branched off that, every 2 years.

Leap is a regular release of tumbleweed, rebased to SLES, to get current packages.

MicroOS is a configuration and repackaging of dunno, leap probably

So they have one baseline, all of them, openSUSE

Liberty Linux is a repackaging of rocky Linux, no? Which ad I said, suse had been doing already before.

And the ranger/kubic stuff came with an own team.

The beastie enabling all these related configurations single source cross CPU architecture is their open build server combined with their openQA.

These guys rock. Except in marketing...

MicroOS is actually based on Tumbleweed. It’s immutable/atomic. I’ve been checking it out and am super impressed. Fits a lot of my use cases.

Oh please don't get me wrong, openSUSE Kubic is the best kubernetes distro i ever had/have...i just think they are too many names for a product...tumbleweed is also the other (not better or worse) arch distribution....but fu* off with btrfs, linux has ~one stable filesystem and it is xfs or zfs ;)

Reiser anyone ;-)

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