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Comment by dschep | Hacker News Reader

> "theres a big chance for someone like Nokia to come in and develop their own approved distro"

SUSE is a German company, so probably nothing to even develop.

Does SUSE normally come up in conversations about "easy to use" linux distros for "normal" users?

I'm not in that world, so this is a genuine question. The last time I looked at SUSE it seemed typically German in being uniquely complicated for no good reason, but that was years ago.

I am suse user for 20+ years with a big break in between. To me it fits the best. Ubuntu I gave up on a while ago and came back to find things so much nicer.

They have a slightly different take on immutable than redhat but it also works well (rollback and all). Also the tumbleweed rolling is quite stable for a bleeding edge rolling release distro. Using it on a few boxes for the last few years and also installing it for other PC noobs and they seem fine with it.

Yes. It was as easy to use as Windows was like 30 years ago. It's still easy to use.

The only difficult part about Linux is the fact that people can't learn, so absolutely anything being different from Windows is a roadblock to the average person (I still remember the societal meltdown when MS changed the interface in their Office apps, or Windows 8...)

I remember SUSE not being harder to use then any other desktop distribution. But it has a lot, and I mean a lot of knobs to turn if you want to. But you don't have to.

Suse is easy to use, just not mainstream.

It was a pretty amusing comment to me. Not only has SUSE been around for over 30 years, it was the very first enterprise Linux and it already has MDM tooling in the multi-Linux manager, repository mirroring tool, open-build system, Kiwi, edge image builder. Everything to build out a full enterprise suite of servers, workstations, customized kiosk OSes, already there. I'm more of the "give me my terminal or give me death" crowd, but it even has YaST and JeOS for the GUI-driven installation and config management that is seemingly what the non-tech crowd wants. A world apart from what the "solo indie devs" of Hacker News are paying attention to, especially in the US, but if Euro governments don't know about this already, that's on them. France doesn't need to roll its own shit unless it just wants to for the hell of it.

> France doesn't need to roll its own shit unless it just wants to for the hell of it.

Which, knowing France, is not unlikely.

Rightfully so, I would say? Given that strategic independence is the starting point for this discussion.

Personally happy that my country has some measure of military autonomy from the U.S.

Though I am in favor of European integration, too.

Oh absolutely. I'm living in Switzerland, there was big discussion some years ago whether we should go with F-35 jets or European alternatives like the Rafale or Gripen. We went with the F-35, which, especially now, more and more looks like the wrong decision.

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