5 ms·

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

by 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.
      - ZeikJT 8y ago
        All they said was that it was weird. Even with the explanation I'd still agree that it's weird.
  - singingfish 8y ago
    "a bit odd" seems normal for SAP (where some value of "a bit" is "a lot")
- brg1007 8y ago
  Yes, SAP seems to be the main selling point ... "SUSE Linux Enterprise Server was the first OS for SAP HANA and SUSE continues to be a co-innovation partner for solutions such as SAP S/4HANA, SAP Cloud Platform, SAP Data Hub and many more. ... "
  - marenkay 8y ago
    ... and the cloud versions of these products are SuSE based as well.
_wmd 8y ago
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/?qt=author&q=suse https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin.... (6 commits per day for the past year)
- the_why_of_y 8y ago
  Indeed, SuSE has a long history of substantial engineering investments: https://lwn.net/Articles/613006/ https://lwn.net/Articles/613006/ Based on this expertise, the only real competitor in their business is Red Hat.
jaabe 8y ago
For some weird reason Suse sees a lot of use in European countries with less English influence, but I haven’t seen any exact numbers in years. In my country (Denmark), most enterprise runs Redhat, but my personal opinion is that Suse would make more sense after the IBM purchase, especially for public sector usage.
- marmaduke 8y ago
  I haven’t used SuSe since version 4 or 5 I think.. do you see it as a viable replacement for CentOS?
  - chronogram 8y ago
    Sure! They have the same goals and both have a good track record. CentOS has the market share advantage.
  - rmk2 8y ago
    It is, or rather it would be, if more cloud providers etc. bothered to provide images. Indeed, I think that RedHat & SuSe are very similar in their ideas and in their usage patterns. Both contribute quite a bit to upstream projects (there is a lot of work being done on CNCF-stuff in both places, both are RPM-based and both offer a number of different "tracks" depending on your needs). openSUSE also has been very good at keeping up with things that are in development. On the desktop-side, I think openSUSE is actually nicer, since they officially support a myriad of DEs (notably both Gnome and KDE). For what it's worth, I use (and have been) using openSUSE both on my work laptop and my private laptop as my daily driver, and I use openSUSE on various private projects as a server OS, though I'm using CentOS 7 at work for all our servers because some of the software we use only supports Ubuntu LTS and CentOS (because the vendor is incapable of building non-idiotic RPMs/DEBs...).
    - toyg 8y ago
      > they officially support a myriad of DEs For years, Suse was the de-facto reference implementation of KDE, where it was the primary desktop. I believe this changed after the Novell acquisition (but it’s been so long, I might misremember), and KDE had to find other ways to get an equivalent “showcase” distro.

by mythz 8y ago

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.
    - ZeikJT 8y ago
      All they said was that it was weird. Even with the explanation I'd still agree that it's weird.
- singingfish 8y ago
  "a bit odd" seems normal for SAP (where some value of "a bit" is "a lot")
brg1007 8y ago
Yes, SAP seems to be the main selling point ... "SUSE Linux Enterprise Server was the first OS for SAP HANA and SUSE continues to be a co-innovation partner for solutions such as SAP S/4HANA, SAP Cloud Platform, SAP Data Hub and many more. ... "
- marenkay 8y ago
  ... and the cloud versions of these products are SuSE based as well.

_wmd 8y ago

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/?qt=author&q=suse https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin.... (6 commits per day for the past year)

the_why_of_y 8y ago
Indeed, SuSE has a long history of substantial engineering investments: https://lwn.net/Articles/613006/ https://lwn.net/Articles/613006/ Based on this expertise, the only real competitor in their business is Red Hat.

jaabe 8y ago

For some weird reason Suse sees a lot of use in European countries with less English influence, but I haven’t seen any exact numbers in years. In my country (Denmark), most enterprise runs Redhat, but my personal opinion is that Suse would make more sense after the IBM purchase, especially for public sector usage.

marmaduke 8y ago
I haven’t used SuSe since version 4 or 5 I think.. do you see it as a viable replacement for CentOS?
- chronogram 8y ago
  Sure! They have the same goals and both have a good track record. CentOS has the market share advantage.
- rmk2 8y ago
  It is, or rather it would be, if more cloud providers etc. bothered to provide images. Indeed, I think that RedHat & SuSe are very similar in their ideas and in their usage patterns. Both contribute quite a bit to upstream projects (there is a lot of work being done on CNCF-stuff in both places, both are RPM-based and both offer a number of different "tracks" depending on your needs). openSUSE also has been very good at keeping up with things that are in development. On the desktop-side, I think openSUSE is actually nicer, since they officially support a myriad of DEs (notably both Gnome and KDE). For what it's worth, I use (and have been) using openSUSE both on my work laptop and my private laptop as my daily driver, and I use openSUSE on various private projects as a server OS, though I'm using CentOS 7 at work for all our servers because some of the software we use only supports Ubuntu LTS and CentOS (because the vendor is incapable of building non-idiotic RPMs/DEBs...).
  - toyg 8y ago
    > they officially support a myriad of DEs For years, Suse was the de-facto reference implementation of KDE, where it was the primary desktop. I believe this changed after the Novell acquisition (but it’s been so long, I might misremember), and KDE had to find other ways to get an equivalent “showcase” distro.