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SUSE targets pre-summer IPO
- jvalencia 6y agoI'm curious if anyone knows why SUSE is going IPO?
- mrweasel 6y agoPerhaps because they’re owned by an investment company who now want their money back. The timing seems right, Redhat is now owned by IBM, so setting SuSE free to compete with Ubuntu and Redhat might be a smart move. Ubuntu is doing their own thing in many respects, and IBM pretty much removed RedHat from the stockmarket, and pissed of some people with CentOS. Those CentOS users need to look for a new distro.
- smnrchrds 6y ago> IBM pretty much removed RedHat from the market Could you please elaborate on this?
- ghaff 6y agoIf someone is moving off on CentOS Linux and doesn't want to start paying for RHEL, why would they want to pay either SUSE or Canonical instead? Certainly they could move to openSUSE but that makes them SUSE users, not customers. And users who have demonstrated they're willing to go through a migration to avoid paying.
- aeyes 6y agoWe pay SUSE and RedHat because enterprise customers demand support contracts with vendors. For everything else we just use CentOS. Also, both SUSE and RedHat have additional features locked behind the enterprise subscription. It might be open source but requires a license.
- _wldu 6y agoThis makes me wonder. What Linux does Google run? I'm guessing Debian.
- ghaff 6y agoI believe their Linux desktops are Debian-based but my understanding is their servers run a highly customized version of Linux that really isn't based on and doesn't look like a conventional distro.
- abrowne 6y agoThey used to use their own Ubuntu variant for desktops, but switched to their own Debian variant. And ChromeOS is based on Gentoo IIRC.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hu3 6y agoI'm looking forward to https://rockylinux.org/ https://rockylinux.org/ By the same author of CentOS and promises to be 100% bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise.
- pelasaco 6y agomy guess is: Investors want to make a good exit and then try to sell it to SAP.
- cognaitiv 6y agoSo if SUSE IPOs at $8.3B, that represents an 320% appreciation or ~82% IRR from the Micro Focus sale in March of 2019 at $2.535. I wonder how much additional value is trapped inside MCRO.L/MFGP while it trades at a COBOL valuation? Looking at you Vertica...
- mrweasel 6y agoMicro Focus is an insanely weird company. It’s just a strange mix of software companies collected during the years, seamingly without any sort of overall plan.
- ghaff 6y agoThere have been a bunch of companies like that over the years. See also CA. What tends to happen is someone has a grand vision of how this acquisition with dovetail neatly with the existing portfolio and the integration gets only part-way there, strategies or the market shifts, and you're left with yet another product that sells enough to keep plugging along but doesn't really fit with anything else.
- cognaitiv 6y agoI don’t think MicroFocus is really organized around integration..it’s more of a PE/holding company like Vista (?imo). The problem remains that they bought the entirety of HP’s software portfolio and transformed it to a declining legacy market valuation. I would not be surprised if a Vertica IPO would raise more than MicroFocus market capitalization (~$2B) and debt ($4B) combined...sort of like SUSE in this case. AWS deal should help, but in reality the mix of holdings doesn’t make sense to me and several of their properties would make more sense standing alone.
- rdpintqogeogsaa 6y agoDon't forget they also hold the copyright to UNIX[1]. They're doing absolutely nothing with it, presumably other than collecting royalties from Xinuos. [1] https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2018/11/26/why-bsd-os-is-the-best-candidate-for-being-the-only-tested-legally-open-unix/ https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2018/11/26/why-bsd-os-is-...
- azinman2 6y agoQuite frankly I’m surprised they still exist. Is it mostly European contracts? You never really hear about SUSE anymore…
- aplanas 6y agoSUSE bought Rancher in 2020, and that was also in the news.
- ghaff 6y agoThey're a German-based company and, yes, they've always been bigger in Europe than in the US (relative to the market as a whole).
- _wldu 6y agoThey once had one of the best KDE desktops available.
- space_ghost 6y agoI have Very fond memories of KDE ~3 running on SuSE 8.1ish in the early 2000s. My XFCE setup today is far cleaner and more efficient, but it doesn't give me the same sense of satisfaction.
- throw2737 6y agoOpensuse still does. Kubuntu or Fedora are far behind.
- Shared404 6y agoOpenSUSE is my go to for when I want a KDE desktop. I just change the color scheme, and everything is good to go.
- Barrin92 6y agoGoogling around a little bit it actually seems like they have a lot of their largest customers in their US. Apparently Whole Foods, Walmart a bunch of other retailers and several American government institutions like Fema and several city administrations. Wouldn't surprise me if the US is actually their largest market.
- codegeek 6y agoCirca 2001/2002, I had a lot of fun learning SUSE Linux where we had CDs of the OS that we could install. I remember being able to do a partition on my Windows (98/XP) and installing SuSE Linux on it. Fun times.
- posterboy 6y agoI remember getting a CD of Suse with a C't magazine and that the installation process simply borked in the middle after a long while. That was that until it worked like a charm with better driver support (and a Debian based distro) a few years later.
- txutxu 6y agoCDs were common in redhat (still without the E of Enterprise linux), debian, slackware and all... But what to say about the manuals? Those manuals and books included with the CDs, in the box. For me they were a catalyst in my Linux learning. Really good quality manuals, with reference tables, and covering many (many) topics. From the the graphical environment to the command line, from the administration of the local system, to network services, good structure, nice tips, cheatsheets, reference tables, even covering kernel compilation! As you say, they did include everything needed, to live together with win98... tools, floppy images, etc... and the documentation about howto do it beforehand. In that modem times, with low speed internet, the CDs where valuable, indeed. But those books included in the box, for people like me in such times (self-taught beginner with Linux) those manuals were like gold! Did use my first linux from a CD in a computers magazine. Did play with redhat, and debian, then I did buy my first suse box with suse 6.0 (around 1999), and did buy again the box for suse 7 and 8. Latter I did get faster internet, and did jump 100% to debian for everything. But I still have those manuals with my books. The complete package (cds + books) is something that I remember fondly for how useful it was to me, and a lot of respect for the work of the people who made it.
- tazjin 6y ago+1 - I learned a lot from those giant manuals. I also remembered calling their (free at the time, I believe?) customer support hotline about issues with some printer and the guy dictating a bunch of kernel parameters to me over the phone (which did fix the issue!). Different times ...
- raverbashing 6y agoIn a way, the pet->cattle transition "killed the Linux distro". Yes they're still important but commoditized In a way it's a bit sad. The Linux desktop never was and we got Android instead The king is dead, long live the king
- amarshall 6y ago> The Linux desktop never was Speak for yourself, my desktop is Linux now after more than a decade of Mac. (But I know what you mean: it never really gained huge traction.)
- fxtentacle 6y agoWe got a usable Linux-inspired OS instead of suffering through the raw deal. It's all the little things like bad window management (can't batch close from alt tab screen) to horrible UX (the new folder button hidden behind a hamburger menu) to idiotic naming (what do thunar and totem do?) and a good dose of not fixing the bugs that your users care about, that made Linux OS un-sellable.
- redisman 6y agoLinux desktop is pretty great for devs. Just like Linux server.
- GNU_James 6y agoWho? That's not how you spell Debian.
- mistrial9 6y agoas someone who supports and uses Debian daily, the poverty problems in the ecosystem get to be dreary sometimes. This SUSE. warts and bruises included, is a distro that wants to do business, for you know, money. In the West, we need companies to find a middle ground.
- GNU_James 6y ago>that wants to do business, for you know, money Software should be free, you know? I don't need another Microsoft screwing with my life.
- unixhero 6y agoThis is great for Linux
- z9e 6y agoI have never actually seen SUSE used in the wild (running services in a data center or Cloud), it's always been CentOS / RHEL, or Ubuntu. SUSE is a great distro though and I'm happy to see this. Does anyone have any anecdata where they've seen it most heavily used?
- LeoPanthera 6y agoopenSUSE is my daily OS, mostly because the Packman repository is so comprehensive.
- hitpointdrew 6y agoI hear it is used quite a lot in Europe. My experience is similar to yours, RHEL or Ubuntu, but I am based in the US. I played a bit with Open SUSE on my home machine, I wouldn't use it a work simply because there aren't as many repos for the package mangager, for instance if you want to install kubeadm you would have to build from source.
- adamcstephens 6y agoI’ve found many yum repos that aren’t specifically opensuse repos still work. Add in the OBS repos and I have been impressed by the available software.
- Vogtinator 6y agokubeadm is in the repo for years meanwhile.
- Cu3PO42 6y agoWhile this may be true, I've also never needed as few third party repositories as I do with openSUSE (particularly Tumbleweed). Virtually everything I've needed is in the official repos in modern versions. (Arch + AUR is a similar story, but honestly I prefer my experience with openSUSE.)
- dologatag 6y ago"Does anyone have any anecdata where they've seen it most heavily used?" In germany. It's quite widespread there in companies and public institutions. I prefer SLES over red hat/centos, but that, of course, is just a matter of personal taste.
- iso8859-1 6y agoYaST (Yet another Setup Tool) is amazing. It allows you to configure your system using a GUI, just like on Windows. It is an important on-ramp to Linux.
- krylon 6y agoBack in the day, they also had SaX (SuSE advanced X-configurator or something like that), a GUI tool to configure XFree86. That was something I sorely missed when I started using other Linux distros and *BSD - editing the config file by hand was so painful there's an xkcd about it: https://xkcd.com/963/ https://xkcd.com/963/
- trollied 6y agoI thought SAP bought them a while ago. Looks like I’m wrong. No idea where I got that from :(
- strictnein 6y agoBoth German and SAP utilizes them a fair amount.
- speakspokespok 6y agoSomewhere around 2001 I bought Suse 7.X. It came in a fold out with each fold carrying a CD. 6 folds for 6 CDs but the 7th fold was the DVD and it had all the 6 CDs of data plus more. That just about blew my teenage mind.
- Aboh33 6y agoAlso echoing some comments here. Suse was and remains one of my favorite distros to this day and was instrumental in my learning nix. Spent alot of time building opensuse distros back in the day with their build service. Just a little disappointed the IPO will not be in US Markets otherwise I'd buy
- mathattack 6y agoThey’ve joined RedHat in pouring a big bucket of sleazy business behavior onto the open source movement.