4 ms·

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.
  - Conan_Kudo 8y ago
    Novell changed it because they had also bought Ximian, who at the time was one of the bigger GNOME development companies. Unfortunately, that legacy remains with us today, and SUSE is not very friendly to KDE for the enterprise, which I think is really a shame.
usr1106 8y ago
First you need to distinguish paid vs. non-paid variants. Suse has SLES and IBM has RHEL. I am not in the position to compare them. The non-paid variants are OpenSUSE vs. CentOS. One big difference there is the support life. CentOS 6 with an ancient 2.6.32 kernel and upstart came out 2011 and is still supported. OpenSUSE releases are supported ~ 1.5 years. There are different opinions whether upgrading from one OpenSUSE release to the next one should be done or not. I typically prefer new installations because they result in cleaner systems. But I also upgraded once an it was painless.
- mseidl 8y ago
  CentOS is RHEL, just without the branding. SLES and openSUSE share the same core packages. So you get the stable, well tested enterprise stuff.
  - rmk2 8y ago
    Correct. I'd say openSUSE is more akin to Fedora in that context as both base and development distribution for SLES, much like Fedora is for RHEL (which in turn then "becomes" CentOS).
    - usr1106 8y ago
      There are 2 OpenSUSE variants, LEAP and Tumbleweed. Their release model has changed maybe 3 years ago. LEAP is exactly the same package versions as in the newest SLES I believe. I would expect them often to be a bit older package versions than Fedora, but I haven't compared recently. Tumbleweed is a leading/bleeding edge rolling release distro. The closest equivalent is Fedora Rawhide.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

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.
- Conan_Kudo 8y ago
  Novell changed it because they had also bought Ximian, who at the time was one of the bigger GNOME development companies. Unfortunately, that legacy remains with us today, and SUSE is not very friendly to KDE for the enterprise, which I think is really a shame.

usr1106 8y ago

First you need to distinguish paid vs. non-paid variants. Suse has SLES and IBM has RHEL. I am not in the position to compare them. The non-paid variants are OpenSUSE vs. CentOS. One big difference there is the support life. CentOS 6 with an ancient 2.6.32 kernel and upstart came out 2011 and is still supported. OpenSUSE releases are supported ~ 1.5 years. There are different opinions whether upgrading from one OpenSUSE release to the next one should be done or not. I typically prefer new installations because they result in cleaner systems. But I also upgraded once an it was painless.

mseidl 8y ago
CentOS is RHEL, just without the branding. SLES and openSUSE share the same core packages. So you get the stable, well tested enterprise stuff.
- rmk2 8y ago
  Correct. I'd say openSUSE is more akin to Fedora in that context as both base and development distribution for SLES, much like Fedora is for RHEL (which in turn then "becomes" CentOS).
  - usr1106 8y ago
    There are 2 OpenSUSE variants, LEAP and Tumbleweed. Their release model has changed maybe 3 years ago. LEAP is exactly the same package versions as in the newest SLES I believe. I would expect them often to be a bit older package versions than Fedora, but I haven't compared recently. Tumbleweed is a leading/bleeding edge rolling release distro. The closest equivalent is Fedora Rawhide.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]