16 ms·

Suse is once again an independent company

364 points by bsg75 8y ago

solarkraft 8y ago
Original announcement: https://www.suse.com/c/news/suse-partners-with-growth-investor-eqt-to-continue-momentum-strategy-execution-and-product-expansion/ https://www.suse.com/c/news/suse-partners-with-growth-invest... Congratulations, SuSe! Edit: The title seems to be a little mischaracterizing, SUSE themselves call it a "Sale to EQT". But I suppose there is no other possibility.
- hyperpape 8y ago
  It’s now owned by a private equity company. So their expectation is that it will grow and make money and they control the board, but the PE company itself doesn’t have a technology business that will determine Suse’s path. If it were a tech company buying them, the assumption would be that the buyer would try to digest Suse and incorporate its components into the parent.
- goodcanadian 8y ago
  Every independent company has an owner or owners. The point is that it has been split off once again from the rest of Micro Focus.
dana321 8y ago
Does anyone care? Nightmare of a linux distro.. If someone says "lets use suse linux" run for the hills!!
- StudentStuff 8y ago
  Suse has been pushing btrfs, zypper and other neat tools forward for years. IBM/Toshiba's 4690 POS (used in all the Kroger stores, Fred Meyers, etc), Walmart's in house POS, OfficeMax/OfficeDepot and numerous others use Suse as a base for their point of sale system, deli scales, and other edge applications.
  - doublepg23 8y ago
    I'm relatively certain 4690 OS is a independent, proprietary OS or at least lacking the Linux kernel, which is pretty important.
    - StudentStuff 8y ago
      IBM stopped development of 4690 OS in 2005, porting all their software to Suse. Toshiba bought the point of sale business from IBM in 2012, but any 4690 based installs are a legacy from the early 2000s, as SuperPOS ACE is what IBM (now Toshiba) has been pushing for the past decade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4690_Operating_System#4690 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4690_Operating_System#4690
      - doublepg23 8y ago
        Yes, SUSE ("IBM IRES" in this case) is a completely different OS from 4690 and nothing on the wiki suggests otherwise.
- 29athrowaway 8y ago
  I don't see a problem with having more actively developed and supported distros to pick from.
- jrs95 8y ago
  It was my first distro when I picked up some installation CDs for it at Microcenter. I never had any issues.
- zepearl 8y ago
  Isn't/Didn't Suse use to be one of the big competitors of RedHat in the OS market for enterprises?
  - pnutjam 8y ago
    Still a big competitor, more popular in Europe. I managed several high performance clusters that ran on SLES.
  - unmole 8y ago
    It still is!
- Cyclone_ 8y ago
  From my experience it's been very reliable and yast has made admin changes very easy.
  - petre 8y ago
    Yup. We use it as well. Quite reliable, easy to upgrade without issues (unlike Ubuntu), easy to configure with yast. I was missing some packages we use for deployment and backup and openSuSE build service came in handy for creating a custom repo. The only issues we had were with old HP hardware. LEAP 15 even has a system that lets you rollback updates but it only works with btrfs (uses fs snapshots) which we don't use out of caution.
- tuco86 8y ago
  Was my first distro too and yes, it was a nightmare. my personal favorite was the gui application to configure X11 and the graphics driver, every failure whould put you back into console sifting through xml configs. but i've heard good things since.
  - masonic 8y ago
    it was a nightmare On some of my HP/Compaq laptops of the time, it was the only major distro that installed right out of the box.
- shasheene 8y ago
  While I'm not particularly a fan, it's important to make clear the company SUSE (that is, SUSE Linux GmbH) has two distributions. It funds the community-maintained openSUSE distribution, but also has SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). openSUSE has a regular ~2 year support window and is probably mostly used by enthusiasts. The commercial SLES product has a 10 year support window (with paid extension for another 3 years). It's a paid product, but 10+ years of software updates for a stable Linux platform is something that's pretty rare to find, and certainty a great option for certain products. Hopefully I'm corrected on this, but RedHat tends to be the only other vendor supporting Linux distributions for such a long period of time?
  - manquer 8y ago
    Cannonical does 5 years for lts for everyone , likely more for enterprise customers
    - doublepg23 8y ago
      Shuttleworth announced in November 18.04 will receive 10 years of support as well.
      - Conan_Kudo 8y ago
        This applies to Ubuntu Core only: https://www.ubuntu.com/core https://www.ubuntu.com/core Standard Ubuntu still has five years: https://www.ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle https://www.ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle
jrs95 8y ago
This is good news. With IBMs acquisition of Red Hat it's valuable to have one of their direct competitors be fully independent.
- timClicks 8y ago
  Canonical is also fully independent..
  - unmole 8y ago
    Personally I've been on Ubuntu for over a decade. But the Telecom industry that I work in is entirely dependent on RHEL and SLES. A few large players (Like my employer) maintain their own distros based on CentOS but I am yet to see anyone use Ubuntu. From what I've heard, it's the same with the Enterprisey industries. So, I'm not sure if considering Canonical a direct competetior to Red Hat is accurate.
    - timClicks 8y ago
      "entirely dependent" is much too strong. Many of the company's largest clients are in the telecom industry (source: on staff). Canonical is very much a competitor to Red Hat.
    - johnmarcus 8y ago
      Just because it doesn't have market share doesn't mean it's not a direct competitor. It's like saying Apple isn't a competitor to Window since it only has 10% market share.
  - VWWHFSfQ 8y ago
    Canonical will be acquired by Microsoft. It's only a matter of time
    - kbumsik 8y ago
      Can I get the source? MS and Canonical have shown strong partnership lately but that doesn't mean MS is going to buy Canonical.
whalesalad 8y ago
What a coincidence. Just the other day I was going to take a trip down memory lane and fire up a few VMs of my first Linux distributions. Then I realized Suse 7.3 (I had a physical box set) wasn’t freely available in ISO format anywhere. Bummer. Still going to hunt down an early Slackware ISO and might try the first versions of Fedora and Ubuntu again.
- redsavagefiero 8y ago
  Try 6.1 noob :)
  - Zardoz84 8y ago
    try 5.3 . The old good YaST rulez
    - pferde 8y ago
      Yast was never good. I still have nightmares of it happily overwriting and destroying my configuration on several occasions. No warnings shown or questions asked.
      - lysium 8y ago
        Oh, memories! Does Suse still use yast or did they replace it?
        pferde 8y ago
        Oh, it's still there, we just never use it. Or mention it in polite company.
        rmk2 8y ago
        openSUSE still "uses" YaST, as in, if you choose to change something via YaST, it will happily do so. You can also simply install/uninstall various components. It also happily integrates with changes made elsewhere (e.g. the "Firewall"-module wraps around firewalld nowadays, which you can influence either via YaST or firewall-cmd etc.). I sometimes use the Package Management part of it, since searching for something is sometimes quite nice in it. That said, I don't use it for installing software or doing updates etc., so you can absolutely use e.g. zypper & YaST side-by-side.
redsavagefiero 8y ago
Loved SuSE forever..well at least since 1998.
snuxoll 8y ago
Wonder how this is going to affect Micro Focus’ other products in the future, they have a lot of software inherited from Novell that relies on SUSE (some of which aren’t even distributed as RPM’s but SLES-based virtual appliances like ZenWorks).
- Conan_Kudo 8y ago
  It's probably not going to affect it very much. SUSE has a decent sized chunk of appliance/embedded Linux business. Aside from SAP, another user that most people wouldn't be too aware of was VMware. Before they created Photon OS, they used SUSE Linux Enterprise for their vCenter appliances. They've been long-time SUSE customers. In addition to that, a large chunk of point-of-sale systems are built using SUSE Linux Enterprise customized JeOS ("Just enough Operating System") appliance systems. I think this is likely to be just fine. (Note, not a SUSE employee, this is just based on my spelunking and research.. ;) )
  - currysausage 8y ago
    Also, if you work at a larger company and have a Siemens/Unify IP phone on your desk, it's not unlikely that it's connected to OpenScape Voice running on SUSE. (Even if it's not an IP phone, it might be connected to a smaller sub-PBX which itself talks to an OpenScape Voice server.
tylerl 8y ago
Still don't know how to pronounce it.
- donatj 8y ago
  I believe like the doctor.
- koolba 8y ago
  In most enterprises it’s pronounced “rehl”.
  - NullPrefix 8y ago
    Haha, a comedian
- earenndil 8y ago
  Ess U Ess Ee
  - benj111 8y ago
    How are you pronouncing U?
    - quakeguy 8y ago
      Like in Suzie?
      - cJ0th 8y ago
        More like (Konrad) Zuse ;)
      - benj111 8y ago
        What about queen? It was an almost legitimate question.
- solarkraft 8y ago
  Suus-eh
mythz 8y ago
I can't be the only one surprised with the $2.5 billion acquisition? Suse basically fell off my radar a decade ago, I thought the next announcement I was going to hear about them was going bankrupt and being sold off for parts. Guess they've been super quiet achievers and have managed to accrue an Annual Revenue of 300M that I've somehow missed behind the release/announcements of flashier distros, but here we are with news of a 2.5B acquisition - congratz to the team.
- singingfish 8y ago
  the SAP team at my old workplace had a bunch of SUSE merch sitting around. Suspect this might be a data point.
  - kriro 8y ago
    A couple of years ago (last time I worked with it) the SAP developer server images for consultants (iirc. it was preconfigured ISOs, it was a bit odd) ran on SUSE so there's a tight connection between the two. Since both have German origins it's not surprising.
    - pferde 8y ago
      Indeed, SAP wants you to run their products primarily on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, with RHEL being an "also ran" (despite enjoying full support from SAP). This despite SLES' controversial and never-working-quite-right "vm.pagecache_limit_mb" kernel parameter (which they're finally ditching in SLES15, I hear). Don't get me wrong, SLES these days is a mature, high-quality distro (I'm working with hundreds of installations running SAP products), but sometimes they do weird things, like bumping kernel version from 2.6 to 3.0 within one service pack (sometimes back in SLES10 or SLES11 days, iirc).
      - jmiserez 8y ago
        Linus talks about the 2.6 -> 3.0 change here: http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1107.2/01843.html http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1107.2/01843.html >As already mentioned several times, there are no special landmark features or incompatibilities related to the version number change, it's simply a way to drop an inconvenient numbering system in honor of twenty years of Linux.
trpc 8y ago
what does SUSE even do in the age of kubernetes?
- Conan_Kudo 8y ago
  They work on the core container engine stuff. Aleksa Sarai (who posts in here every once in a while as "cyphar") is the maintainer of runC, which is core to most popular container runtimes (containerd/docker, podman, cri-o/kubernetes, etc.). They also work on building a platform for trivially deploying and scaling Kubernetes within openSUSE as Kubic[1]. SUSE has a variant of this as the SUSE CaaS platform[2] ("container as a service" platform) product. Kubic is analogous to Fedora CoreOS[3], while CaaSP is similar to RHEL CoreOS that's part of OpenShift[4]. [1]: https://kubic.opensuse.org/ https://kubic.opensuse.org/ [2]: https://www.suse.com/products/caas-platform/ https://www.suse.com/products/caas-platform/ [3]: https://coreos.fedoraproject.org/ https://coreos.fedoraproject.org/ [4]: https://blog.openshift.com/openshift-4-install-experience/ https://blog.openshift.com/openshift-4-install-experience/
  - trpc 8y ago
    thank you, never heard of Kubic until now
  - cyphar 8y ago
    In addition to all of the container work we do, we also still maintain a distribution and do a tonne of upstream work. While people seem to have forgotten about the purpose of distributions with the whole container thing, they still provide a few things: * Continued upstream development of core system software. * A host system that is stable and up-to-date (which you need to run your container manager). * Container images which have up-to-date software, timely security patches, and reasonable security policies. Distributions are the only members of the ecosystem which actually solve these problems in any meaningful way. It's a shame that we seem to be boring (or even vestigial) at this point despite all of this new software still requiring our work in order to actually run.
  - rmk2 8y ago
    Richard Brown gave two talks at FOSDEM 2019 about Kubic, as well: https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/speaker/richard_brown/ https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/speaker/richard_brown/
caymanjim 8y ago
I'm amazed that Suse has $2.5B to buy themselves. It's a horrible OS to work with. Anything not based on Apt as a package manager is a nightmare. What does Suse bring to the table other than pain? It's not as easy as Ubuntu, and not as well-known or well-supported as RedHat (which is also a pain in the ass, but at least a well-known pain in the ass). Who even uses Suse?
- gjs278 8y ago
  I don’t consider anything less than gentoo’s emerge or freebsd’s ports to be acceptable. binary packages can always end up in an incompatible state.
- laumars 8y ago
  Suse is rock solid and, for a time, was basically the Redhat of Europe. I still find places in the UK that run it but it’s less common now than it used to be. I completely disagree with your point that anything not based in apt is horrible to work with.
- nilsocket 8y ago
  I personally haste to use apt and for me anything is unacceptable other than pacman based distributions.
- black-tea 8y ago
  You only think apt is good because you're used to it and probably haven't used it very extensively. Portage is clearly a better package manager, have you used that?
  - caymanjim 8y ago
    Apt was the first package manager for a widely-used distribution (Debian) that handled dependencies well. I'm certainly biased, and haven't used everything available, but I have to be realistic about Linux distros in a professional environment. Your options at work are RPM-based distros (RedHat, CentOS, SuSE) or Apt-based distros (Ubuntu, and to a lesser extent Debian). I'd never heard of Portage. Google indicates that it's Gentoo's package manager. It may be fantastic, but Gentoo is a hobby OS. Companies aren't going to use Gentoo. I'm not going to use Gentoo, because any benefits it has are going to be minimal, and it's never going to help my career. There's a vast array of software out there that might be great for specific purposes, but I'm not going to swim upstream. So, while Gentoo and Portage may be fantastic, they're simply not on my radar, and certainly not on the radar of anyone I may work for. I'm not disagreeing with you; we're just talking about completely different worlds at this point.
parsistrans 8y ago
hi Congratulations, https://parsistrans.com https://parsistrans.com
chb 8y ago
"Few companies have changed hands as often as Suse and yet remained strong players in their business." "Strong players"? What quantitative evidence exists demonstrating that SuSE has any more than a marginal and insignificant share of server or desktop installs?
- mongol 8y ago
  I found this interesting: "Not that surprising, SLE POS is one of SUSE's best selling products For example, in the states, 70% of Fortune 100 merchandisers, speciality retailers, and food and drug stores use it Including a few big names like Walmart" https://www.reddit.com/r/openSUSE/comments/b1cvdj/spotted_at_my_supermarket/eiktvvw https://www.reddit.com/r/openSUSE/comments/b1cvdj/spotted_at...
- benj111 8y ago
  You picked a strange hill to make your stand on. Its journalistic verbiage, what do you want them say? Ultimately its been bought for $2.5billion, if it were a startup it would be a unicorn, it seems to be moving forward, what more do you want. There are probably many companies that have changed hands that many times also.
- the_why_of_y 8y ago
  The market SuSE is in is not "server or desktop installs", it is "support contracts/subscriptions for server or desktop installs", and they have to have a non-negligible share of that market, given that Wikipedia claims they have 1400 employees, which is more than 10% of Red Hat's number. There is some more data in this article: https://fosspost.org/analytics/insights-on-redhat-suse-the-major-linux-companies https://fosspost.org/analytics/insights-on-redhat-suse-the-m... Interestingly it claims 750 employees for SuSE in 2016; perhaps the business entity sold today includes some departments that were elsewhere in the org-chart in 2016?
mongol 8y ago
I am personally quite happy for this, I found SUSE in 2002 as it was installed on the computer I got at that workplace. I have never really left it since. Zypper, yast and Open Build Service are strong points, and lately I have used the Kiwi image creation tool. Solid too. I hope the best for this distribution.
gpresot 8y ago
Being owned by a Private Equity fund can really not be described as being "independent". Such funds have a typical investment horizon of 5-7 years, with potential exits being an IPO, a strategic sale (to a bigger company) or a sale to another PE fund, with the strategic sale probably more typical. In the mean time the fund will impose strict growth targets and strong cost cuts.
- indigochill 8y ago
  Yeah, I'm not sure how anyone can call private equity "independent". Our whole last year had selling the company as our top priority. Not something I'd choose in a truly independent position.
- maaaats 8y ago
  Im working for a company that was bought by a private equity in 2015 and taken off the stock market. Then introduced to the market again about two years later. They left us mostly alone, and most things actually turned to the better. Maybe not having to answer to thousands of shareholders gave management the possibility to implement some needed changes. One example was a new salary/bonus/retirement structure giving a huge boost to most of us. So YMMV.
  - ui-explorer12 8y ago
    good point - there is far less reporting and PE has a much longer time frame than the 2 quarters everyone but Warren Buffet cares about
- ui-explorer12 8y ago
  I think it really depends on a couple of important variables, including cash flows and company management. Our private equity overlords care mostly about the macro goals that are generally well defined in advance (sales targets, M&A budgets, bonus pool) and our CEO has done this a few times so he has a track record of predictable returns, which is primarily what a PE fund wants, vs the hockey stick growth of VC money. In this economic climate and especially outside of the US, PE gives you a lot of the benefits of going public without the extra scrutiny and reporting. I've seen several established companies in my industry forgo going public and unlock liquidity via private equity or sovereign wealth funds.
z3t4 8y ago
Can someone explain the business model of suse and redhat ? Is it selling open source software ? How can that be worth billions ? How do you do practically ? Direct sales to enterprise !? Is there a lot of configuration and extra feature implementation, or does most enterprise run "vanilla" ? How do you brak into this market ?
- NullPrefix 8y ago
  Selling support
- pferde 8y ago
  Expensive support contracts, and in case of SUSE, some add-on software channels that come with the contracts (SLES for SAP, High Availability, Containers, etc.) being locked away behind paywall.
- marenkay 8y ago
  Business models of all big software companies are identical and have not changed in decades: You buy licenses, renew them yearly. With various levels of premium support to select from.
  - dmacvicar 8y ago
    Subscriptions, not licenses. Subscriptions give you access to different level of support, and access to updates.
pi-victor 8y ago
openSUSE is a really good and modern linux distro, people complaining about here probably haven't used it in a long while. Whilst i worked in A&T we handled a few thousand+ servers running SLES 11 SP2 and it was solid. I think they're biggest handicap is they're not from the US and while i worked there people acknowledge they have horrible marketing. Also being bought and sold a few times doesn't help, and with the HPE acquisition a few years back, a lot of employees (on HPE side) simply left. The kubic project has developed the only viable alternative to CoreOS that's being phased out. Unfortunately where MicroOS falls short is SUSE's stubbornness for using BtrFS, which causes a lot of headaches and has been dropped from all major distros at this point. People in the kubic project have also been contributors to kubernetes, kubeadm, OCI, (they even contributed a lot of code to podman, from Red Hat) and they've been a significant driving force for rootless containers https://rootlesscontaine.rs/ https://rootlesscontaine.rs/. It's weird they're not more often in the limelight with all the hard work they do, but maybe they'll take this opportunity to fix their marketing and steer into a better direction :).
- privateSFacct 8y ago
  btfrs is such a weird choice for an enterprise focused system where people mostly want reliability / set and forget, though maybe the bad rep is old now (I haven't used btfrs in years).
  - mistrial9 8y ago
    an engineering "teacher of teachers" I spoke with was able to corrupt btrfs with a few well-chosen strokes, as it was told. The implication was - not ready. This was three or four years ago.
    - Twirrim 8y ago
      I'm still reluctant to trust it, but there has been a lot of work on btrfs in that time frame, particularly around reliability and durability. https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/?qt=grep&q=btrfs https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
Annatar 8y ago
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server is by far the most mature of all GNU/Linux distributions. Their AutoYaST provisioning system with Kiwi imaging capability is conceptually identical to Solaris' JumpStart™️ with compressed Flash™️ archives and is technologically superior to Docker images because it is much more simpler, yet offers the same conceptual capability without the need for cgroups. Their technical support is wonderful and they truly deserve to be the most deployed GNU/Linux distribution in the enterprise. I hope they succeed in stamping out redhat because they have a superior product with far more competent engineering and support.
bsg75 8y ago
I wonder if EQT's investment is interest in potential growth from Enterprise customers that may seek alternatives to IBM if their RHEL relationships change? Suse being the "other RPM distro".
- boxedwine 8y ago
  EQT buying SUSE was announced before IBM buying Red Hat was announced. So it can't have been a reason at the time. Though I suspect it's a happy circumstance now for EQT/SUSE.

364 points by bsg75 8y ago

Original announcement: https://www.suse.com/c/news/suse-partners-with-growth-investor-eqt-to-continue-momentum-strategy-execution-and-product-expansion/ https://www.suse.com/c/news/suse-partners-with-growth-invest... Congratulations, SuSe! Edit: The title seems to be a little mischaracterizing, SUSE themselves call it a "Sale to EQT". But I suppose there is no other possibility.

hyperpape 8y ago
It’s now owned by a private equity company. So their expectation is that it will grow and make money and they control the board, but the PE company itself doesn’t have a technology business that will determine Suse’s path. If it were a tech company buying them, the assumption would be that the buyer would try to digest Suse and incorporate its components into the parent.
goodcanadian 8y ago
Every independent company has an owner or owners. The point is that it has been split off once again from the rest of Micro Focus.

dana321 8y ago

Does anyone care? Nightmare of a linux distro.. If someone says "lets use suse linux" run for the hills!!

StudentStuff 8y ago
Suse has been pushing btrfs, zypper and other neat tools forward for years. IBM/Toshiba's 4690 POS (used in all the Kroger stores, Fred Meyers, etc), Walmart's in house POS, OfficeMax/OfficeDepot and numerous others use Suse as a base for their point of sale system, deli scales, and other edge applications.
- doublepg23 8y ago
  I'm relatively certain 4690 OS is a independent, proprietary OS or at least lacking the Linux kernel, which is pretty important.
  - StudentStuff 8y ago
    IBM stopped development of 4690 OS in 2005, porting all their software to Suse. Toshiba bought the point of sale business from IBM in 2012, but any 4690 based installs are a legacy from the early 2000s, as SuperPOS ACE is what IBM (now Toshiba) has been pushing for the past decade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4690_Operating_System#4690 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4690_Operating_System#4690
    - doublepg23 8y ago
      Yes, SUSE ("IBM IRES" in this case) is a completely different OS from 4690 and nothing on the wiki suggests otherwise.
29athrowaway 8y ago
I don't see a problem with having more actively developed and supported distros to pick from.
jrs95 8y ago
It was my first distro when I picked up some installation CDs for it at Microcenter. I never had any issues.
zepearl 8y ago
Isn't/Didn't Suse use to be one of the big competitors of RedHat in the OS market for enterprises?
- pnutjam 8y ago
  Still a big competitor, more popular in Europe. I managed several high performance clusters that ran on SLES.
- unmole 8y ago
  It still is!
Cyclone_ 8y ago
From my experience it's been very reliable and yast has made admin changes very easy.
- petre 8y ago
  Yup. We use it as well. Quite reliable, easy to upgrade without issues (unlike Ubuntu), easy to configure with yast. I was missing some packages we use for deployment and backup and openSuSE build service came in handy for creating a custom repo. The only issues we had were with old HP hardware. LEAP 15 even has a system that lets you rollback updates but it only works with btrfs (uses fs snapshots) which we don't use out of caution.
tuco86 8y ago
Was my first distro too and yes, it was a nightmare. my personal favorite was the gui application to configure X11 and the graphics driver, every failure whould put you back into console sifting through xml configs. but i've heard good things since.
- masonic 8y ago
  it was a nightmare On some of my HP/Compaq laptops of the time, it was the only major distro that installed right out of the box.
shasheene 8y ago
While I'm not particularly a fan, it's important to make clear the company SUSE (that is, SUSE Linux GmbH) has two distributions. It funds the community-maintained openSUSE distribution, but also has SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). openSUSE has a regular ~2 year support window and is probably mostly used by enthusiasts. The commercial SLES product has a 10 year support window (with paid extension for another 3 years). It's a paid product, but 10+ years of software updates for a stable Linux platform is something that's pretty rare to find, and certainty a great option for certain products. Hopefully I'm corrected on this, but RedHat tends to be the only other vendor supporting Linux distributions for such a long period of time?
- manquer 8y ago
  Cannonical does 5 years for lts for everyone , likely more for enterprise customers
  - doublepg23 8y ago
    Shuttleworth announced in November 18.04 will receive 10 years of support as well.
    - Conan_Kudo 8y ago
      This applies to Ubuntu Core only: https://www.ubuntu.com/core https://www.ubuntu.com/core Standard Ubuntu still has five years: https://www.ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle https://www.ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle

jrs95 8y ago

This is good news. With IBMs acquisition of Red Hat it's valuable to have one of their direct competitors be fully independent.

timClicks 8y ago
Canonical is also fully independent..
- unmole 8y ago
  Personally I've been on Ubuntu for over a decade. But the Telecom industry that I work in is entirely dependent on RHEL and SLES. A few large players (Like my employer) maintain their own distros based on CentOS but I am yet to see anyone use Ubuntu. From what I've heard, it's the same with the Enterprisey industries. So, I'm not sure if considering Canonical a direct competetior to Red Hat is accurate.
  - timClicks 8y ago
    "entirely dependent" is much too strong. Many of the company's largest clients are in the telecom industry (source: on staff). Canonical is very much a competitor to Red Hat.
  - johnmarcus 8y ago
    Just because it doesn't have market share doesn't mean it's not a direct competitor. It's like saying Apple isn't a competitor to Window since it only has 10% market share.
- VWWHFSfQ 8y ago
  Canonical will be acquired by Microsoft. It's only a matter of time
  - kbumsik 8y ago
    Can I get the source? MS and Canonical have shown strong partnership lately but that doesn't mean MS is going to buy Canonical.

whalesalad 8y ago

What a coincidence. Just the other day I was going to take a trip down memory lane and fire up a few VMs of my first Linux distributions. Then I realized Suse 7.3 (I had a physical box set) wasn’t freely available in ISO format anywhere. Bummer. Still going to hunt down an early Slackware ISO and might try the first versions of Fedora and Ubuntu again.

redsavagefiero 8y ago
Try 6.1 noob :)
- Zardoz84 8y ago
  try 5.3 . The old good YaST rulez
  - pferde 8y ago
    Yast was never good. I still have nightmares of it happily overwriting and destroying my configuration on several occasions. No warnings shown or questions asked.
    - lysium 8y ago
      Oh, memories! Does Suse still use yast or did they replace it?
      - pferde 8y ago
        Oh, it's still there, we just never use it. Or mention it in polite company.
      - rmk2 8y ago
        openSUSE still "uses" YaST, as in, if you choose to change something via YaST, it will happily do so. You can also simply install/uninstall various components. It also happily integrates with changes made elsewhere (e.g. the "Firewall"-module wraps around firewalld nowadays, which you can influence either via YaST or firewall-cmd etc.). I sometimes use the Package Management part of it, since searching for something is sometimes quite nice in it. That said, I don't use it for installing software or doing updates etc., so you can absolutely use e.g. zypper & YaST side-by-side.

redsavagefiero 8y ago

Loved SuSE forever..well at least since 1998.

snuxoll 8y ago

Wonder how this is going to affect Micro Focus’ other products in the future, they have a lot of software inherited from Novell that relies on SUSE (some of which aren’t even distributed as RPM’s but SLES-based virtual appliances like ZenWorks).

Conan_Kudo 8y ago
It's probably not going to affect it very much. SUSE has a decent sized chunk of appliance/embedded Linux business. Aside from SAP, another user that most people wouldn't be too aware of was VMware. Before they created Photon OS, they used SUSE Linux Enterprise for their vCenter appliances. They've been long-time SUSE customers. In addition to that, a large chunk of point-of-sale systems are built using SUSE Linux Enterprise customized JeOS ("Just enough Operating System") appliance systems. I think this is likely to be just fine. (Note, not a SUSE employee, this is just based on my spelunking and research.. ;) )
- currysausage 8y ago
  Also, if you work at a larger company and have a Siemens/Unify IP phone on your desk, it's not unlikely that it's connected to OpenScape Voice running on SUSE. (Even if it's not an IP phone, it might be connected to a smaller sub-PBX which itself talks to an OpenScape Voice server.

tylerl 8y ago

Still don't know how to pronounce it.

donatj 8y ago
I believe like the doctor.
koolba 8y ago
In most enterprises it’s pronounced “rehl”.
- NullPrefix 8y ago
  Haha, a comedian
earenndil 8y ago
Ess U Ess Ee
- benj111 8y ago
  How are you pronouncing U?
  - quakeguy 8y ago
    Like in Suzie?
    - cJ0th 8y ago
      More like (Konrad) Zuse ;)
    - benj111 8y ago
      What about queen? It was an almost legitimate question.
solarkraft 8y ago
Suus-eh

mythz 8y ago

I can't be the only one surprised with the $2.5 billion acquisition? Suse basically fell off my radar a decade ago, I thought the next announcement I was going to hear about them was going bankrupt and being sold off for parts. Guess they've been super quiet achievers and have managed to accrue an Annual Revenue of 300M that I've somehow missed behind the release/announcements of flashier distros, but here we are with news of a 2.5B acquisition - congratz to the team.

singingfish 8y ago
the SAP team at my old workplace had a bunch of SUSE merch sitting around. Suspect this might be a data point.
- kriro 8y ago
  A couple of years ago (last time I worked with it) the SAP developer server images for consultants (iirc. it was preconfigured ISOs, it was a bit odd) ran on SUSE so there's a tight connection between the two. Since both have German origins it's not surprising.
  - pferde 8y ago
    Indeed, SAP wants you to run their products primarily on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, with RHEL being an "also ran" (despite enjoying full support from SAP). This despite SLES' controversial and never-working-quite-right "vm.pagecache_limit_mb" kernel parameter (which they're finally ditching in SLES15, I hear). Don't get me wrong, SLES these days is a mature, high-quality distro (I'm working with hundreds of installations running SAP products), but sometimes they do weird things, like bumping kernel version from 2.6 to 3.0 within one service pack (sometimes back in SLES10 or SLES11 days, iirc).
    - jmiserez 8y ago
      Linus talks about the 2.6 -> 3.0 change here: http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1107.2/01843.html http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1107.2/01843.html >As already mentioned several times, there are no special landmark features or incompatibilities related to the version number change, it's simply a way to drop an inconvenient numbering system in honor of twenty years of Linux.

trpc 8y ago

what does SUSE even do in the age of kubernetes?

Conan_Kudo 8y ago
They work on the core container engine stuff. Aleksa Sarai (who posts in here every once in a while as "cyphar") is the maintainer of runC, which is core to most popular container runtimes (containerd/docker, podman, cri-o/kubernetes, etc.). They also work on building a platform for trivially deploying and scaling Kubernetes within openSUSE as Kubic[1]. SUSE has a variant of this as the SUSE CaaS platform[2] ("container as a service" platform) product. Kubic is analogous to Fedora CoreOS[3], while CaaSP is similar to RHEL CoreOS that's part of OpenShift[4]. [1]: https://kubic.opensuse.org/ https://kubic.opensuse.org/ [2]: https://www.suse.com/products/caas-platform/ https://www.suse.com/products/caas-platform/ [3]: https://coreos.fedoraproject.org/ https://coreos.fedoraproject.org/ [4]: https://blog.openshift.com/openshift-4-install-experience/ https://blog.openshift.com/openshift-4-install-experience/
- trpc 8y ago
  thank you, never heard of Kubic until now
- cyphar 8y ago
  In addition to all of the container work we do, we also still maintain a distribution and do a tonne of upstream work. While people seem to have forgotten about the purpose of distributions with the whole container thing, they still provide a few things: * Continued upstream development of core system software. * A host system that is stable and up-to-date (which you need to run your container manager). * Container images which have up-to-date software, timely security patches, and reasonable security policies. Distributions are the only members of the ecosystem which actually solve these problems in any meaningful way. It's a shame that we seem to be boring (or even vestigial) at this point despite all of this new software still requiring our work in order to actually run.
- rmk2 8y ago
  Richard Brown gave two talks at FOSDEM 2019 about Kubic, as well: https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/speaker/richard_brown/ https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/speaker/richard_brown/

caymanjim 8y ago

I'm amazed that Suse has $2.5B to buy themselves. It's a horrible OS to work with. Anything not based on Apt as a package manager is a nightmare. What does Suse bring to the table other than pain? It's not as easy as Ubuntu, and not as well-known or well-supported as RedHat (which is also a pain in the ass, but at least a well-known pain in the ass). Who even uses Suse?

gjs278 8y ago
I don’t consider anything less than gentoo’s emerge or freebsd’s ports to be acceptable. binary packages can always end up in an incompatible state.
laumars 8y ago
Suse is rock solid and, for a time, was basically the Redhat of Europe. I still find places in the UK that run it but it’s less common now than it used to be. I completely disagree with your point that anything not based in apt is horrible to work with.
nilsocket 8y ago
I personally haste to use apt and for me anything is unacceptable other than pacman based distributions.
black-tea 8y ago
You only think apt is good because you're used to it and probably haven't used it very extensively. Portage is clearly a better package manager, have you used that?
- caymanjim 8y ago
  Apt was the first package manager for a widely-used distribution (Debian) that handled dependencies well. I'm certainly biased, and haven't used everything available, but I have to be realistic about Linux distros in a professional environment. Your options at work are RPM-based distros (RedHat, CentOS, SuSE) or Apt-based distros (Ubuntu, and to a lesser extent Debian). I'd never heard of Portage. Google indicates that it's Gentoo's package manager. It may be fantastic, but Gentoo is a hobby OS. Companies aren't going to use Gentoo. I'm not going to use Gentoo, because any benefits it has are going to be minimal, and it's never going to help my career. There's a vast array of software out there that might be great for specific purposes, but I'm not going to swim upstream. So, while Gentoo and Portage may be fantastic, they're simply not on my radar, and certainly not on the radar of anyone I may work for. I'm not disagreeing with you; we're just talking about completely different worlds at this point.

parsistrans 8y ago

hi Congratulations, https://parsistrans.com https://parsistrans.com

chb 8y ago

"Few companies have changed hands as often as Suse and yet remained strong players in their business." "Strong players"? What quantitative evidence exists demonstrating that SuSE has any more than a marginal and insignificant share of server or desktop installs?

mongol 8y ago
I found this interesting: "Not that surprising, SLE POS is one of SUSE's best selling products For example, in the states, 70% of Fortune 100 merchandisers, speciality retailers, and food and drug stores use it Including a few big names like Walmart" https://www.reddit.com/r/openSUSE/comments/b1cvdj/spotted_at_my_supermarket/eiktvvw https://www.reddit.com/r/openSUSE/comments/b1cvdj/spotted_at...
benj111 8y ago
You picked a strange hill to make your stand on. Its journalistic verbiage, what do you want them say? Ultimately its been bought for $2.5billion, if it were a startup it would be a unicorn, it seems to be moving forward, what more do you want. There are probably many companies that have changed hands that many times also.
the_why_of_y 8y ago
The market SuSE is in is not "server or desktop installs", it is "support contracts/subscriptions for server or desktop installs", and they have to have a non-negligible share of that market, given that Wikipedia claims they have 1400 employees, which is more than 10% of Red Hat's number. There is some more data in this article: https://fosspost.org/analytics/insights-on-redhat-suse-the-major-linux-companies https://fosspost.org/analytics/insights-on-redhat-suse-the-m... Interestingly it claims 750 employees for SuSE in 2016; perhaps the business entity sold today includes some departments that were elsewhere in the org-chart in 2016?

mongol 8y ago

I am personally quite happy for this, I found SUSE in 2002 as it was installed on the computer I got at that workplace. I have never really left it since. Zypper, yast and Open Build Service are strong points, and lately I have used the Kiwi image creation tool. Solid too. I hope the best for this distribution.

gpresot 8y ago

Being owned by a Private Equity fund can really not be described as being "independent". Such funds have a typical investment horizon of 5-7 years, with potential exits being an IPO, a strategic sale (to a bigger company) or a sale to another PE fund, with the strategic sale probably more typical. In the mean time the fund will impose strict growth targets and strong cost cuts.

indigochill 8y ago
Yeah, I'm not sure how anyone can call private equity "independent". Our whole last year had selling the company as our top priority. Not something I'd choose in a truly independent position.
maaaats 8y ago
Im working for a company that was bought by a private equity in 2015 and taken off the stock market. Then introduced to the market again about two years later. They left us mostly alone, and most things actually turned to the better. Maybe not having to answer to thousands of shareholders gave management the possibility to implement some needed changes. One example was a new salary/bonus/retirement structure giving a huge boost to most of us. So YMMV.
- ui-explorer12 8y ago
  good point - there is far less reporting and PE has a much longer time frame than the 2 quarters everyone but Warren Buffet cares about
ui-explorer12 8y ago
I think it really depends on a couple of important variables, including cash flows and company management. Our private equity overlords care mostly about the macro goals that are generally well defined in advance (sales targets, M&A budgets, bonus pool) and our CEO has done this a few times so he has a track record of predictable returns, which is primarily what a PE fund wants, vs the hockey stick growth of VC money. In this economic climate and especially outside of the US, PE gives you a lot of the benefits of going public without the extra scrutiny and reporting. I've seen several established companies in my industry forgo going public and unlock liquidity via private equity or sovereign wealth funds.

z3t4 8y ago

Can someone explain the business model of suse and redhat ? Is it selling open source software ? How can that be worth billions ? How do you do practically ? Direct sales to enterprise !? Is there a lot of configuration and extra feature implementation, or does most enterprise run "vanilla" ? How do you brak into this market ?

NullPrefix 8y ago
Selling support
pferde 8y ago
Expensive support contracts, and in case of SUSE, some add-on software channels that come with the contracts (SLES for SAP, High Availability, Containers, etc.) being locked away behind paywall.
marenkay 8y ago
Business models of all big software companies are identical and have not changed in decades: You buy licenses, renew them yearly. With various levels of premium support to select from.
- dmacvicar 8y ago
  Subscriptions, not licenses. Subscriptions give you access to different level of support, and access to updates.

pi-victor 8y ago

openSUSE is a really good and modern linux distro, people complaining about here probably haven't used it in a long while. Whilst i worked in A&T we handled a few thousand+ servers running SLES 11 SP2 and it was solid. I think they're biggest handicap is they're not from the US and while i worked there people acknowledge they have horrible marketing. Also being bought and sold a few times doesn't help, and with the HPE acquisition a few years back, a lot of employees (on HPE side) simply left. The kubic project has developed the only viable alternative to CoreOS that's being phased out. Unfortunately where MicroOS falls short is SUSE's stubbornness for using BtrFS, which causes a lot of headaches and has been dropped from all major distros at this point. People in the kubic project have also been contributors to kubernetes, kubeadm, OCI, (they even contributed a lot of code to podman, from Red Hat) and they've been a significant driving force for rootless containers https://rootlesscontaine.rs/ https://rootlesscontaine.rs/. It's weird they're not more often in the limelight with all the hard work they do, but maybe they'll take this opportunity to fix their marketing and steer into a better direction :).

privateSFacct 8y ago
btfrs is such a weird choice for an enterprise focused system where people mostly want reliability / set and forget, though maybe the bad rep is old now (I haven't used btfrs in years).
- mistrial9 8y ago
  an engineering "teacher of teachers" I spoke with was able to corrupt btrfs with a few well-chosen strokes, as it was told. The implication was - not ready. This was three or four years ago.
  - Twirrim 8y ago
    I'm still reluctant to trust it, but there has been a lot of work on btrfs in that time frame, particularly around reliability and durability. https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/?qt=grep&q=btrfs https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

Annatar 8y ago

SuSE Linux Enterprise Server is by far the most mature of all GNU/Linux distributions. Their AutoYaST provisioning system with Kiwi imaging capability is conceptually identical to Solaris' JumpStart™️ with compressed Flash™️ archives and is technologically superior to Docker images because it is much more simpler, yet offers the same conceptual capability without the need for cgroups. Their technical support is wonderful and they truly deserve to be the most deployed GNU/Linux distribution in the enterprise. I hope they succeed in stamping out redhat because they have a superior product with far more competent engineering and support.

bsg75 8y ago

I wonder if EQT's investment is interest in potential growth from Enterprise customers that may seek alternatives to IBM if their RHEL relationships change? Suse being the "other RPM distro".

boxedwine 8y ago
EQT buying SUSE was announced before IBM buying Red Hat was announced. So it can't have been a reason at the time. Though I suspect it's a happy circumstance now for EQT/SUSE.