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SUSE to be acquired by EQT Partners
- syntaxing 8y agoHow does something like this work when there are parts of the code that is community driven. Do the volunteers get any share of the pie? That being said, is there still a lot of people that use SUSE? I remember a lot of people used to rave (particularly academic) about it due to it's stability. I remember playing with their distro builder a couple of years ago and you can choose the specific packages and settings to install which was super neat.
- Kocrachon 8y agoI've worked for a few small businesses that used suse as an alternative to RHEL. I've never worked for a large company that has. I also know a few individuals who use it for personal projects. But that's about it.
- calgoo 8y agoi worked in BigEnterprise and they changed to Suse from RHEL because the price was significant lower, and the company had internal admins and other support contracts for managing the server support. The rule was that every software had to have a support contract behind it, even if we never used it.
- skissane 8y agoI've encountered it in large enterprises (esp. public sector) that were running NetWare, eDirectory, GroupWise, Zenworks, etc., and went to SUSE (more specifically OES) as the natural follow-on from NetWare. One large organisation I'm aware of, they used to have both SUSE and Oracle Linux, and SUSE was managed by the former NetWare team, and Oracle Linux was managed by the Unix admin team and used for Oracle RDBMS and Oracle middleware. But, in my experience, most eDirectory/GroupWise shops ended up migrating to AD/Exchange, and SUSE often went away in that process, especially if the organisation already has RHEL or Oracle Linux as well.
- pnutjam 8y agoRolls-Royce uses SLES for their high performance computer clusters, but RHEL everywhere else. I used to maintain their US Linux infrastructure.
- pbarnes_1 8y agoPeople use SuSE with SAP products.
- majewsky 8y agoCan confirm. I work at SAP's internal cloud department, and SLES is a popular base for SAP system installations (alongside Windows Server). There's also quite some RHEL, mostly because teams chose it before their companies got acquired by SAP.
- mbesto 8y agoSUSE is the OS that runs under SAP HANA. https://www.suse.com/products/sles-for-sap/hana/ https://www.suse.com/products/sles-for-sap/hana/ It used to be exclusively the only OS you could use (can't confirm if anymore).
- bonzini 8y agoSUSE is particularly popular in Germany indeed, because its origins are in the German company SuSE GmbH.
- krylon 8y agoWhen I first got to know GNU/Linux, SuSE was the go-to distro in Germany, because it came with German documentation, and - most important to me - ISDN worked out of the box. Also, Yast made it very newbie-friendly.
- majewsky 8y agoIt was also my first distro for 5 years. I then switched to Arch Linux.
- krylon 8y agoI think I see Arch somewhere in my future, but I have not come around, yet. ;-) I run Arch in a VM on my home server, but I don't really do anything with it. The installation procedure makes OpenBSD's look decadently comfortable, but I admit once it runs, it seems to just keep working.
- tormeh 8y agoIt's apparently the leader in HPC. Don't really know why. Support, maybe?
- michaf 8y agoMost HPC cluster installations I know (small to medium edu sites in Germany) use CentOS / RedHat. Source: am part-time HPC sysadmin
- voxadam 8y agoInteresting, I thought SUSE was king in Germany.
- rootbear 8y agoAt least one NASA supercomputer runs Suse. A review of the TOP500 list would probably reveal quite a few Suse HPC systems.
- guiriduro 8y agoDon't SUSE tout that they can do in-place kernel upgrades? So if you want to keep your iron running all the time, no interrupted experiments, no reboots; SUSE is the distro to go for.
- pokpokpok 8y agoposting from it now, love having a rolling distro with nice UX
- jstarfish 8y agoSUSE works well in enterprise environments. It's one of the only distros I know of that are easily configurable to work with corporate proxies without a bunch of application wrappers and hacks.
- StudentStuff 8y agoIn the US, its the OS that runs the checkouts, deli scales and most everything else at Walmart and all of Kroger's subsidiaries.
- SEJeff 8y agoDo you have a source for this by chance?
- jchw 8y agoI don't have a source but I know the IBM SurePOS units at Kmart indeed ran an old version of SuSE Linux.
- quiq 8y agoAnecdotal, but I remember ~4 years ago working at Walmart as a summer job. The handheld scanners (telzon/gemini) you see employees with would boot to SUSE. A lot of back office software like employee schedules and permissions with those handhelds were still managed with what looked like curses based stuff.
- apazgo 8y agoWe have around 30k machines running sles in production (stores) around the world. Deployed around 4000 more a couple of weeks ago, so yes, it exists for sure. Not in the US tho.
- nickpsecurity 8y agoJust watch the screens of anything the companies use when you're in there. Look at the model numbers and Google them. You'll find a lot given most aren't that creative: they do a customized version of the default, enterprise offering. For instance, a restarting computer at the local Kroger where I shop said IBM SurePOS. Looking it up, it turns out some group tried to make a concurrent version of DOS that IBM modified into a specialized OS for POS's. Recently, they upgraded to touchscreens running Linux on Fujitsu boxes. The GUI is ugly, slow, and has the tell-tell coffee mug in corner of dialogs. Appears Kroger, always slow as can be, got on Java desktop bandwagon just as everyone else chasing fads were leaving it for stuff like web apps or Electron. The self-checkouts have a Windows loading screen. Probably was WinXP Embedded given they're old. The handhelds use mainframe-era, terminal apps. Their computers at customer service are thin clients from HP at this location. I think one said "Iceweasel" one time. The checkout predictor thing with the three balls on monitor showed something Linux-related one time. If you ask employees, you'll get SCO OpenServer, AS/400, mainframe, and a pile of random apps with web interfaces. I don't know what they run. One employee told me email and web browsers load in what must be VM's that take 5-10 min to load on the thin clients. It must be unbearable. So, Kroger certainly uses plenty of Linux with mission-critical services being on it. Their choices for inventory and desktop GUI's also hint they're pretty backwards in their practices. I'm not sure about the others since I mostly shop at Kroger.
- tw04 8y agoSuSE still has a huge presence in Europe.
- digi_owl 8y agoThey seem to (still) be headquartered in Germany, so they may carry the same weight in Europe as RH does in the US.
- dec0dedab0de 8y agoI used Suse during that window after Redhat discontinued desktop support, and before debian had an installer. I remember thinking YAST was wonderful, and being very upset about their deal with Microsoft after Novell bought them.
- yuhong 8y agoI mentioned Novell in my essay and how its revenue declined quickly after they moved away from NetWare, including Client Access Licenses.
- amorousf00p 8y agoAnd how did you expect that to go? Netware was bug central, I used it from 3.x - 6. Linux killed them...and it was time for Netware to go. I remember the first time I compared Border Manager with OpenSuSE (2.2 kernel -w-w ipchains) & squid as proxy. Eye opening. No more midnight reboots. No more opaque interfaces and $$ for nothing.
- yuhong 8y agoWhat I was talking about is that SuSE Linux of course had no CALs, you only pay for support like with RHEL. This is unlike NetWare and Windows
- amorousf00p 8y agoMissed that, thx.
- pnutjam 8y agoYast is great, OpenSuse's greatest strength is it's great hardware support, the best IMHO.
- v0lta 8y agoI use openSUSE Leap 15 as my daily driver. Since I don't want to tinker every weekend with my distro anymore I need something stable. openSUSE Leap, based on SLE, offers this. Additionally KDE is a first-class citizen and just works as intended. There's also a rolling release version, Tumbleweed, but I didn't try it yet.
- dkersten 8y ago> Since I don't want to tinker every weekend with my distro anymore Do many people actually do this, though? A few years ago, I used Arch as my main distro, and, besides the initial setup, almost never tinkered with it. I would imagine that more approachable distros would be more tinker-free too.
- eikenberry 8y agoIt really depends on what you qualify as tinkering. I switched to Debian stable as I found the constant upgrade cycle of rolling distros to require to much tinkering.
- xnyan 8y agoExactly. Arch is less work to maintain for me, even less than Ubuntu 16.04
- morganvachon 8y agoIt's true that the most approachable distros (SUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu and its derivatives like Elementary OS) are more or less "tinker free" these days. For those of us who still like to tinker while maintaining a stable base, there are distros like Debian, Slackware, Void, and so on. And finally, for those who consider Linux a hobby or pastime (or who are comfortable living on the bleeding edge) there are projects like Arch, Neon, and Gentoo.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoI think I would group Arch with [Debian, Slackware, Void] rather than with Gentoo (if we're restricted to those two groups).
- ItsMe000001 8y agoYour question is from a long-gone era, when it was all about the "Linux distribution" as such (a time when I myself still worked for one of those big Linux companies). These days that's just a necessary but in the end secondary item. Instead the business is all about "enterprise stuff": clusters, storage, cloud, SAP, devops, HPC - i.e. "solutions". The Linux distribution merely is the vehicle and the basis, the actual business is well on top of it though, on another level. Check out what redhat.com and suse.com present on their respective homepages (no need to go deep, just the headlines - the SuSE pages show it a bit better I think, open the "Products & Solutions" menu on suse.com for an overview). I follow a few people I knew at SuSE and whenever they post something on social media it's cluster these, high availability stuff that, distributed storage here, containers there. It's never about the "boring" Linux OS level any more, always about software and solutions on top of it. By the way, I just checked the job listings (https://www.suse.com/company/careers/ https://www.suse.com/company/careers/) to see what they are up to, and there are 320 open positions? Really? Did they grow that much? When I left the Linux world almost 15 years ago that was about the total size of that company, that was just a few years after Novell had acquired it. It confirms the impression I had from loosely following some SuSE engineer's social media posts, getting handed over to new owners again and again does not seemed to have hindered them from growing quite a bit. Wikipedia says they have a thousand employees now.
- Waterluvian 8y agoIt's fractal, I think? Novel technology becomes optimized and ubiquitous and newer more complex technology is built on top of it. Then the same happens to that tech.
- clon 8y agoThat is a really good way to visualize that! Once you zoom out you can see the repeating patterns though..
- zapita 8y ago> The Linux distribution merely is the vehicle and the basis, the actual business is well on top of it though, on another level. Check out what redhat.com and suse.com present on their respective homepages Those homepages are a picture of where Red Hat and Suse want their business to go - not where it actually is. In practice both companies have struggled to diversify into broader “enterprise solutions”. After 20+ years, the vast majority of Red Hat’s revenue still comes from the good old RHEL subscription. Everything else - storage, java, openstack, containers, IDEs - is still far behind. They seem to be betting everything on Kubernetes being the new Linux, but we tend to forget just how huge Linux was in the late 90s... And how huge Red Hat was in the Linux world. This time they’re a medium-sized fish in a medium-sized pond. Kubernetes is cool, but is it cool enough to get Red Hat from $3B to $10B in revenue, with hundreds of vendors pushing their own Kubernetes service? Personally I don’t see it. As a point of comparison, Vmware is nearing $8B and has successfully diversified into storage and networking. It’s a testament to the incredible momentum of Linux adoption on the server, that even Suse (a distant second in the business of commercial Linux) has survived this long without any meaningful diversification. Personally I think we’ll see Red Hat getting acquired in the next 5 years, while they can still a good multiple on the “cloud native” hype. If they wait too late, the reality will set in that Openshift revenue can’t grow fast enough to offset a shrinking RHEL business. If they wait too long, they will end up like Suse.
- pzone 8y agoIt is my personal choice for a KDE distribution. It is hard to find a combo of "solid and reliable" and "runs KDE" within the Red Hat and Debian distro families.
- jacquesm 8y agohttps://kubuntu.org/ https://kubuntu.org/
- hrcxxx 8y agoYes, but kubuntu is .deb based and not .rpm based.
- jlgaddis 8y agoAnd Slackware is neither. What's the point?
- yellowapple 8y agoHaving used both Kubuntu and openSUSE+KDE, I'd argue the latter is much more stable.
- segmondy 8y agoIf "SUSE" the company can own some "IPs/assets" why can't another entity buy/acquire "SUSE the company" and own everything that SuSE owns?
- umanwizard 8y ago> Do the volunteers get any share of the pie? If someone wrote code (as a volunteer, not for hire) and licensed it as GPL, SUSE doesn't own that code, and the new owners of SUSE won't own it either, so everything is the same as it was before.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- oliwarner 8y ago> Do the volunteers get any share of the pie? No. Why would they? You're providing a stub for interesting debate here but you did it without any expectation that YC would pay you for it. You did it for the betterment of the internet, or the karma, or something in the middle, but either way, YC owes you nothing for it and you [happily] entered into that arrangement without thinking about it. The people contributing to SUSE —through bug reports, bug fixes, maintaining the community, the tens of thousands of upstream projects that it uses via open licenses, etc, etc, etc— aren't doing so with an expectation that somebody will pay them down the line. But indirectly, SUSE users (some of whom will contribute) and customers get a distribution with a new lease of life. They get continued use of its infrastructure and packagers and developers.
- yellowapple 8y agoI use openSUSE routinely (it's my go-to both for enterprise-grade stuff and for home users switching from Windows). I've yet to use SUSE itself, but given what I've seen from openSUSE, I have little reason to believe it to be any less excellent of a distro (and probably better suited to enterprise use, if only because of the available support contracts).
- mikece 8y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17440824 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17440824 << posted six hours earlier
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kev009 8y agoOut of curiosity, are there any readers of this site that rune SUSE in prod? My understanding is it is more of a force in the EU, I've known some desktop users of it (good KDE integration), but I've never encountered it in my work or job interviews etc in the US. edit: ah there are a few anecdotes nested in this comments already.
- LogicX 8y agoJust had a convo yesterday with someone at BigCo who standardizes on it... I was surprised to hear it too.
- djsumdog 8y agoI run openSUSE for my mail server, but that's in the process of being migrated to OpenBSD. When I worked at the University of Cincinnati in 2012, we had a lot of stuff running on SLES, mostly because we were running Novel's Identity Management system. That was a while back though and I'm not sure if they're still down that route since Novell turned into Micro Focus and, I guess now, EQT.
- pknopf 8y agoSide question, for your mail server, do you ever find that your outbound messages get sent to spam?
- djsumdog 8y agoDear god yes! I wrote a whole post on that bullshit: https://penguindreams.org/blog/how-google-and-microsoft-made-email-unreliable/ https://penguindreams.org/blog/how-google-and-microsoft-made...
- kev009 8y agoSetting up a mail server is somewhat intricate as admins added hurdles to cut spam. This was on HN a while back and is good stuff https://www.c0ffee.net/blog/mail-server-guide https://www.c0ffee.net/blog/mail-server-guide SPF, DKIM, DMARC all need to be set up. Check to see if the IP is any RBLs. Time also helps as the major MXers "learn" you are a real mail server.
- helpme420 8y agoSweden, YES!
- jonhendry18 8y agoAre EQT Partners the kind of private equity firm that tries to profit by running profitable companies? Or are they the kind of private equity firm that loads up its companies with debt, pays itself massive dividends, and then lets the companies struggle and die under unsustainable debt loads? (See: Toys 'R Us, etc)
- mongol 8y agoWere not familiar with them but as a Swede I thought to check their board to see if I can recognise some names. And indeeds, it contain well known industrialists. Such as: Finn Rausing of Rausing family, who made a fortune on founding Tetrapak Peter Wallenberg Jr. Wallenberg family is the most established "capitalist" family in Sweden with historical ties far back and still significant stake in companies such as Ericsson Leif Östling, former CEO of Scania, now on the board of Volkswagen
- njoro 8y agoWallenberg is behind EQT and they aren't so much industrialists as crony capitalists and oligarchs. They are the driving force behind, as well as one of the main profiteers of, privatization in Sweden in recent years. Thomas von Koch, the head of EQT, has said on national TV that he thinks Sweden should be more like Singapore. Leif Östling most recently had to resign as head of the main employers organization after revelations of tax planning and the Rausing family isn't really a role model for anyone. So they are all pretty much crooks. I guess EQT mostly does what it says on the tin, restructure and sell companies. If you ever wondered why so many people only have relatively expensive cable internet in Sweden instead of being connected directly to widely available fiber networks that is to a large extent because of EQT.
- mongol 8y agoQuite personal opinions there. For anyone reading the thread, I definitely would not call neither of them crooks.
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- ram_rar 8y agoI used to have SUSE before, but nowadays its either RHEL or Ubuntu/debian. Its such a shame that, there is barely any new players in the server os market.
- alex_duf 8y agoI think it boils down to the fact that not that many innovations are coming from the distribution itself. It used to be true, especially when it came to recognizing hardware or simplifying install, but nowadays most hardware is recognized and most distro's install is simple (except Arch, but I like arch, so go figure). I suppose the biggest innovation in the past few years have been in terms of virtualization, and they were barely dependent on the distribution as most of the work was done upstream on the linux Kernel. So it's hard to be a newcomer and have strong selling points. Maybe the next generation of kernel programmed in type safe, memory safe languages would be interesting?
- jason_slack 8y agoI had thought about trying to implement some sort of bindings around the kernel to allow devs to use Go or Rust. Kotlin might not be bad either. When I was learning via LFS I felt like there is still a lot of innovation that can be done. I remember back in 2000 I attended a Linux World Expo and it was amazing. It felt great to see all these companies dedicating resources to making Linux better. Now, I don't feel like it is quite the same anymore. There were companies inventing all sort of solutions from large scale server management to desktop apps to, to, to. Companies gave out stuffed toys. I still have a SUSE branded lizard, a Fedora and 5-6 more.