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Comment by throwawaaarrgh | Hacker News Reader

Enterprises don't care what distro they use, and SuSE knows that. Enterprises care about the reputation of their professional services provider.

RHEL is increasingly seen as threatening its own place in the market, and enterprises want to be sure their multi million dollar investments will be stable over the long term. Paying SuSE for support makes sense if you believe they will support you better over the long term than RHEL will. Time will tell who provides more value, but SuSE does appear to be out-IBMing IBM.

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From what I've seen big enterprises have thousands of RHEL or SLES licenses and the whole thing is managed by one guy who can hardly migrate from RHEL 7 to RHEL 8 because of the huge backlog of work he has.

For the average enterprise switching from SLES to SUSE RHEL means that update will happen in 5-7 years

Had to laugh at that, as I still have a good deal of RHEL/CentOS 7 and I'm the "one guy" managing these systems.

I've been migrating to Ubuntu or retiring systems for the last two years and still not done. Hoping to be rid of RHEL 7 before updates stop.

I've done a few of those RHEL/CentOS/Ubuntu moves myself, and even though it was a pain I'm still somewhat impressed over how painless the actual move was when I had good documentation and also still terrified of what it feels like to try to transition undocumented boxes.

I dislike windows and the M$ ecosystem but as far as server management for undocumented servers it's much easier to deal with them than for Linux stuff. For an undocumented Windows server, you send out an email, wait 2 weeks, shut it down and listen for the screams.

For an undocumented Linux server, you send out an email, wait 2 weeks, prep the fire extinguishers, batten the hatches, and wait for the mob of angry villagers to storm the DC with pitchforks because thanks to you their print server for their paper checks is now printing in Klingon and it can't be fixed without resurrecting the guy that wrote the software 6 days before he died of terminal terminal disease.

so what you're saying is nothing business critical runs on Windows?

No. Just that Windows servers are much easier to navigate to find what files and systems are running.

With Linux systems, sure, you can check chron and top and find what is running and where it is but it's a bit more unwieldy than the windows GUI, plus you don't always have a full list of the file and folder permissions and getting a full list of those requirements for whichever softwares are accessing them.

Oh, I see, that makes sense.

You struck a nerve on this one ;)

No biggie, they could always outsource it to IBM and they'll do it in 4 years.

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