The History of S.u.S.E

I worked there for more than a decade, and I can never highlight enough:

- How great the place was for those involved in the open-source ecosystem

- How great Novell and Attachmate were as owners

The company had, like many others, good and tough times, but the people were very passionate about it.

I will never stop feeling lucky for it being part of me for so many years.

SuSE doesn’t get enough credit for the quality of the distribution. Transactional updates, serious work towards a reproducible distribution, nano as an excellent container runtime, stability under large workloads - it’s a nice piece of engineering.

SUSE has always been this perennial figure in the Linux world for me; the Linux Distro that isn't talked about often, but is generally liked and respected, by most people who use it.

I ran OpenSUSE for about a year in 2013-2014, and it did sort of have the Just Works nature to it: things did more or less what I expected them to do without much tinkering. It was the first Linux that I liked enough to be my sole operating system instead of dual booting, which should say something by itself.

I stopped running OpenSUSE because I bought a new laptop which had Nvidia Optimus, and someone told me that that was easier to get working with Arch, so that's what I did, and I haven't really touched SUSE since, but I will always respect it for getting me interested in Linux and open source.

I worked there for a few years during the Novell/Attachmate management. They had a strong bias towards the kernel teams and engineers. They had an european work culture and some very good leads. Their Engineers were very good. The internal mailing lists were ripe with technical discussions. Got some amazing friends and inspirational engineers with whom I would love to work again.

However, There were infighting between the GNOME and KDE desktop teams. The VPs were mostly overpaid and practically useless. The constant churn of acquisition, looking for a new buyer, etc. did not help their long term cause.

With the older system software (kernels, compilers, etc) and infra layer getting commoditized I wonder how long they may remain relevant. When they brought in a new CEO and acquired Rancher I hoped that they may recover with K8S etc, but the CEO has quit and the acquisition has not done much it seems. Until they remove some dinosaurs from the old management at VP levels, I honestly do not see any recovery for them. Thumbs up for the Engineering (and leads) and heavy thumbs down for the Management, is how I remember my time there.

I like openSUSE, but the predictability is dirt poor (which is why I don't use it for servers...or anything else).

About two years ago, LEAP was supposed to be canned for this new shiny thing, since then...nothing. So, dear openSUSE, should I install openSUSE Leap? Wait for the "new" thing, is this "new" thing also free or what? Or you know what? I have a better idea...I just install Debian or FreeBSD (community based, no endless reselling, no corporate overlord, clear messaging).

SuSE was my first Linux system and it helped a lot to spark my interest. Yast (software manager) and SaX (XFree86 configuration tool) were a Godsend for a noob like me in 199x.

It's still solid today, and I hold it in high regards, even if I moved to greener Linux pastures.

One thing not made clear in that history was their role in ARM Linux. There was a guy there, I forget his name (I think it was Andy). We learned a lot about making an ARM compiler for CL from him. He really was the, at the low level, the one that help make ARM Linux happen.

Anyone remember his name? Definitely would like to give him a shout out.

It might have been Andreas Färber.

After Red-Hat and Mandrake, it became my favourite home distro until Ubuntu came into the scene.

Still have the SuSE 6.3 box, like it used to be common in those days.

Yast is a great tool, and SusSE is one of the few distros that isn't stuck in the 1970's view of what means OS administration.

Also an ideal candidate for the upcoming age of siloed countries, stuck in commercial wars.

My first introduction to linux was SuSE 7.2. Got it in the physical box from a local Borders bookstore. I think I was about 12-13 years old. Installed it on the family Gateway computer (PIII, 128mb ram).

Wow, the mention of SLS takes me back. SLS was the first Linux distribution I ever used. (Not counting the very early days of manually extracting tar archives of userspace binaries to make a system...) I remember passing around the precious shoebox of SLS floppies from person to person in high school. :)

One thing I always found awesome is that even the very first versions, like "Linux Aktuell 4.x" from 1996 or so, already had full support for Braille terminals during installation.

That made SuSE very usable for blind people, even installable, while for other operating systems you always needed someone to set the system up for you (and probably still do).

I am not blind personally (and I don't know anybody who is), but I still found that a fascinating thing to do (I assume they knew someone who was blind and required that support?)

And then there was /usr/bin/zast as a symlink pointing to /usr/bin/yast - just in case you had a DIN keyboard, but the matching keymap hadn’t been loaded.

I was always blown away by the fact that YaST could run either as a GTK app or a CLI/ncurses tool. The same config was available in both.

Back when I was using SuSE regularly, I was developing a pluggable web-based admin tool. I always wanted to look at the way YaST was written to see if I could do something similar for creating a web UI, but my project got sidelined before I got very far.

Very informative, I knew Slackware Translation was the first product, but I did not know how they went from Slackware to their own distro.

I used SuSE for many years as my daily driver, and it was generally a very nice ride, and I have/would recommended it to others. I got away from it a few years back because I was always hitting something I wanted to install that was "we know about Debian and Redhat...everything else you're on your own". I think I remember the last-straw was getting a video-in card and associated OSS HDTV software running...fought for a while with SuSE and Debian 'Just Worked'. If I had more time to build-from-source this probably would have been a non-issue, but if I'm going to get a new hobby building everything from source, there are probably a couple of other distros I should look at.

I should definitely revisit it...I keep running into "the Debian + Backport version of this software is just a little too out of date for what you want to do" and Ubuntu has pissed me off in other, more annoying ways too many times.

SUSE is a strong partner for my managed products, and every person I have worked with there has been skilled and good people.

Don't forget about LST: https://www-lst-de.translate.goog/de/main.php?id=02&_x_tr_sl...

I got a soft spot for SUSE. In the late 2000s, Novell partnered with my highschool to teach a certification class, so it became the distribution I cut my teeth on if you don't count my time playing with compiz window effects on a free Ubuntu live-disk in junior high.

Son of a gun! I've been working at SUSE for a bit of a year, and a lot of the positive things people say here still ring true, at least to me.

Wow, I haven't seen Yggdrasil mentioned in a long time. In the early 90s, one of the guys at work tried to install it on a 386 PC. They never quite succeeded. Just a couple of years later I was running SuSE at home, after having started with Red Hat. The improvement in the distributions in that short amount of time was impressive.

I think this was my first (or among my first) Linux distributions, around 2000 or so. I did not had Internet access back then. I had some coding experience (mostly Basic; I was just learning C++). I made a dual installation with Windows. I don't really remember the details anymore, but I struggled with really using it, and after I played around with it (maybe it lead to some system freeze and then I did a cold restart), at some point it would not boot anymore. But also, I was not really learning anything about how it works, and did not really understand too much. I think I also tried Red Hat later but had similar experience.

Then some time later, I got Internet access, and I read about Gentoo, and the tutorial to install it from scratch was really well written and easy to follow, and that helped me really a lot in understanding how Linux really works, what components are involved in the whole system. I continued using that for many years. Whenever there was some problem, I was able to understand it and fix it.

Nowadays, I just want to use sth which is so widespread that it is very well supported, and I can expect that any problem can be found on the Internet with some solution, and sth where I just need to spend only a minimal amount of effort to keep it running and up-to-date, so I chose Ubuntu (already couple of years ago; not sure if my choice today would be the same, but for now I stick to it). So this is sth which basically just works. But I wonder, for a newcomer who really wants to understand how Linux works, I think I would rather recommend Gentoo or Arch Linux or so. I think I also prefer the rolling release concept (Arch, Gentoo) over the point release development model (Ubuntu, Debian, Suse, Slackware, etc).

IMHO, Deutsche Linux-Distribution (DLD) was the first german linux distribution (first release in 1992).

I can't believe YaST is that old

SUSE is not very popular in southeast-east asia I suppose. for corp here (at least in my country), the defacto OS for enterprise is RedHat. Never once I heard SUSE was considered.

Why is it written as an initialism as if you would pronounce each letter individually? At least for English speakers, that's not the way, right?

openSUSE is neat! If only I could actually update it from 15.4 to 15.5 without getting a Curl error. :(

I remember using the Novel SLD distro back in the day. It was really polished.

I've been a user of openSUSE since "openSUSE", nearly. It's my daily driver, today.

I want to say I was playing with Mandrake, Red Hat and a little Gentoo at the time. I started using it regularly around 2010ish - I was working at a Windows shop and had a pretty elaborate home lab with Windows servers and domain controllers so I could do things at home "before trying that on corporate." I remember the deciding factor became "I can use YaST to add this device to my domain controller and login with domain credentials easier than I can add a Windows box to the domain." And I found that was often the theme with many tasks, whether they're unusual like "logging into a Windows host" or mundane. Over the years, the software options available have been pretty incredible. I run Tumbleweed in most places and it's, by far, the smoothest "bleeding edge rolling update" distribution I've worked with. `Snapper` was my first experience with "working rollback."

Because of the fine folks at openSUSE, I went from "knowing nothing about Linux" to "using it as my primary desktop" and I'm mostly a .NET developer. So many development tasks are just easier to do under Linux, whether it's the pesky node or python module that needs gcc/LLVM to compile some dependency and the expansive set of software repositories and available `.rpm`s make it all very straight-forward.

I recently picked up a higher-end AMD GPU and was dismayed to find that ROCm support was limited, mostly, to Ubuntu[0]. I got everything mostly working in Tumbleweed -- interestingly, most of the AI workloads I put it through worked as well in Tumbleweed as they did in Ubuntu following the official documentation but a few of the ROCm utilities didn't run. I ended up reloading with Ubuntu and quickly regretted the situation. Stupidly, I assumed doing a distribution update would be flawless like it typically is with Tumbleweed. After all, the only way to actually update Tumbleweed is via a distribution update, and 2K packages later it very rarely fails to boot. I knew right away that I wouldn't have the safety of being able to pick the previous snapshot but I was surprised that when it failed half-way through it didn't bother to roll anything back; it simply left my machine in a broken state that booted directly to a text console. Having re-loaded this box four times in the prior few days, I decided to go back to what I knew.

About the only complaint I have centers around their default choice of `btrfs` for the filesystem. While I like the CoW functionality (the only particular "advanced" feature that I utilize with `btrfs`), it seems to excel -- mostly -- at teaching me about filesystem recovery. My home lab isn't anywhere near as elaborate as it had been in the past. It seems even on a UPS with proper shutdowns it's ridiculously prone to getting itself into a state where a `btrfs restore` is the only way to recover from a filesystem problem. Every single time I get everything back except for some random cache/tmp/log file but I need to dig up or purchase a volume of equal size to restore it to, meaning I have to keep around an empty drive at least as large as my largest volume. It seems to me "if the filesystem can literally restore everything except for a file or two that has become corrupted" it should offer a "dangerous" option to do so online. To this day I have never had to restore everything from an actual backup, it's always gotten back everything important simply restoring the broken filesystem to a new volume and the filesystem becomes corrupted without explanation -- power didn't fail, the system had a clean shutdown, it just randomly goes "read-only" with a guarantee that the next boot will drop to an emergency console. Unfortunately, CoW helps a lot with the work I do and ends up being worth the grief involved. While I've had fewer failures in the last couple of years and an easier time recovering from those failures, it's often a full day's work to get everything right, again.

[0] Support exists for Leap but the repositories were broken for a solid month while I was setting things up.

The photo looks like it's an 80ies synth-pop band.

Also, "Sure, one could download all forty Slackware floppy disk images, but it would take quite a bit of time on a 28.8kbps modem"

Yes...yes it does.

On a more serious note, I miss the days when Linux and open source software where on the rise. Things weren't perfect, but there was a lot of idealism and a desire to build cool stuff and the whole "tech bro" thing wasn't what it is today.

I honestly love OpenSUSE. About the only negative thing I can say about it is that zypper, an otherwise perfect package manager, is really, absurdly slow.

Wow that brings back memories!