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SUSE Liberty Linux: secure your Linux future without fear of vendor lock-in.
- sylware 3y agodeveloper/vendor lock-in is done at the SDK level: gcc(via c++), glibc(via manic abuse of versioning + a hard dep on gcc), etc.
- mschuster91 3y agoEveryone can fork gcc and glibc, they are fully open source. In any case the question remains why one would want to... there are alternatives for both of 'em (musl/dietlibc for glibc, llvm for gcc). As long as you keep to the POSIX/C/C++ standards and don't use vendor-specific attributes (or at least abstract them away via macros), you shouldn't run into issues using another kernel, libc or compiler.
- sylware 3y agoYou missed the point. Any fork is deterred by the massive size and complexity of those. c++ is adding several orders of magnitude on complexity (there are no reasonable comparison to make between C syntax complexity and c++ syntax complexity). All that is part of the developer/vendor lock-in. This is how Big Tech has vendor locked some open source software. That's why generic "open source" is hardly less worse than corpo binaries, because it includes grotesquely and absurdely massive and complex software. We need lean, functional enough, open source, SDK included.
- photonbeam 3y agoRed hat’s lock-in is in certifications for various software and situations. Suse is a genuine competitor in this space
- itpcc 3y agoIt appears you have content blocking enabled. To use all the features of this site, use a non-private window, or turn off content blocking for this site. Yeah... No need to fear of vendor lock-in huh?
- c_r_w 3y agoCame here to say the same thing. "Liberty"... I'm using a Pihole to block trackers.
- yonatan8070 3y agoIt works fine for me on Android, in a private Firefox tab, with uBlock Origin and a PiHole
- toyg 3y agoThe actual announcement: https://www.suse.com/c/suse-liberty-linux/ https://www.suse.com/c/suse-liberty-linux/ Interesting play - basically they will offer generic enterprise-grade Linux support, with a not-so-veiled view to slowly replace existing installations (typically RHEL or CentOS, both explicitly namechecked) with SuSE, leveraging "SuSE Manager". It's clearly a reaction to the civil war in the RedHat world.
- carlosrg 3y ago> It's clearly a reaction to the civil war in the RedHat world. The date of the announcement is January 2022 so it can't be that.
- coldtea 3y agoIt's not like RedHat started the civil war with the recent announcement only...
- jzb 3y agoSUSE has offered some level of support for RHEL/CentOS for a long time. They’ve had various programs over the years, long before this, to support customers who are on RHEL but might migrate to SLES. The specific SKUs and details change from time to time, but it’s not really a new thing. As a trailing competitor, it’s a reasonable thing to do.
- _4ta5 3y agoOh man does SUSE(often via Microsoft referrals) provide support for a lot of Linux distros. If you are willing, they'll pretty much support any reasonable distro. Ages ago at a large managed hosting company we had 10s of 10000s of RHEL licenses but we also had a lot of people using CentOS for various reasons. Long story short, since CentOS only supported the current point release at the time we had a lot of boxes out there that needed critical patches. SUSE provided us with CVE fixes for any CentOS release we wanted to support and we were able to distribute them via our internal RHN system to CentOS machines. It made the auditors happy.
- candiddevmike 3y agoDidn't realize witnessing a market leader flex their strength and have it backfire so badly would be so cathartic. Wish it would happen to other businesses more often.
- thesuperbigfrog 3y agoAll of the shops using RHEL derivatives may be looking at their options with Red Hat's forced changes. SUSE may be a viable alternative depending on the workload requirements and cost. RHEL's push could be Red Hat's loss. “The more you tighten your grip, the more systems will slip through your fingers.”
- vbezhenar 3y agoI thought SLES is paid as well?
- przemub 3y agoIt is but OpenSUSE is free and binary-compatible since the last release - just like CentOS used to be for RHEL. SLES is also cheaper from my experience.
- dev_daftly 3y agoI'm pretty sure opensuse is upstream from sles and probably closer to fedora than centos stream.
- madspindel 3y ago> Leap uses source from SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE), which gives Leap a level of stability unmatched by other Linux distributions https://get.opensuse.org/leap/15.5/ https://get.opensuse.org/leap/15.5/
- ElectricalUnion 3y agoAFAIK, comparing to what Red Hat offers: * openSUSE Factory is comparable to Fedora Rawhide (upstream "development" rolling release); * openSUSE Tumbleweed is comparable to CentOS Stream (upstream "stable" rolling release); * openSUSE Leap is comparable to SLE and RHEL (stable conventional point releases).
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- krylon 3y agoA cynical person might read this as: "Even if you don't use SUSE, you can still give us your money" But SuSE Linux was my first Linux distro, an for the past couple of years[0], I've been a happy openSUSE user, so I'm not that cynical. [0] I still have the box with the CDs and manuals sitting on my bookshelf. :-) EDIT: Forgot a word.
- galangalalgol 3y agoI'm considering trying SuSE MicroOS as a desktop for a while. Any thoughts? I tried suse for a few weeks about a quarter century ago then went back to slackware, so I have no relevant experience.
- krylon 3y agoI haven't tries MicroOS, so I cannot comment on that. I use both Leap and Tumbleweed and am quite happy with both. Tumbleweed occasionally breaks something, but but it uses snapper to create a snapshot before each update, so if there's a problem, I boot into the most recent stable snapshot and wait for a couple of days before I update again. Leap is very stable in my experience, while also offering relatively up-to-date packages. The main problem is that out of the box, support for multimedia is not very good, but there is community-run repository with everything I need, i.e. video codecs and such. If you have a spare computer, I suggest just installing it on that and giving it a try. Otherwise, a virtual machine. It's a lot more heavyweight than Slackware, obviously, and if you dislike systemd, you might not like it very much. But I don't know your preferences and requirements are, so the best I can say is to give it a try and decide for yourself.
- galangalalgol 3y agoI've been using a mix of things. I actually like gnome for some reason, but anything that lets me avoid the mouse is fine. Systemd is a don't care for this experiment because I want something container focused anyway, where init or systemd can start podman and I'll take it from there. And I want rolling because I like not messing with things that aren't the thing I'm doing. I like apt better than dnf for cross compiling tools, but dnf better for most everything else.
- 0xbadcafebee 3y agoSuSE's bread and butter is professional services. They don't care what software you use, as long as you pay SuSE to consult on it. From a practical perspective: I wouldn't use them. Their acquisition of Rancher was/is terrible. I literally couldn't give them my money without one of those stupid sales calls. Their website doesn't even have a working contact form; I had to go to their Slack to get some random engineer's attention. I'm told by colleagues that they ignore your (paid) support tickets. I have worked for enough pain-in-the-ass enterprises that I will avoid them at all costs.
- hhh 3y agoInteresting… my experience has been the opposite, except for getting support. I prefer being able to get the product for free immediately and then chat about support later. It’s why we use Rancher, because it takes 20min to set up with Helm, vs like Tanzu where you have to have. an entire call and licensing and accounts to even download anything. Or D2iQ where you need to fumble with getting everything set up for a while with the sales and technical people. Rancher has been great for me with around 200 clusters. They don’t support temporary creds for IAM stuff, so I have to provision EKS clusters on my own. We pay for paid support and have very little problems getting them on the phone, but it is generally a consulting firm that ends up helping.
- EwanToo 3y agoThis is from 2022, not a response to this months Redhat announcements?
- jmclnx 3y agoMissed again, was meant for story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36573872 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36573872
- ilyt 3y ago...just use Debian. Soooo much less fuss than any of the "enterprise" ones.
- SoftTalker 3y agoBut if your commercial or scientific software is only supported on RHEL or SLES then you can't just "use Debian."
- hospitalJail 3y agoI suppose I can google/chatGPT this, but since both are unreliable I'll ask here: Which software?
- NegativeK 3y agoI've dealt with an environment that was using custom software that relied on a library that only SUSE had in their repo. From a tamer perspective (and that's not that bad,) there are definitely vendors who will develop only against a single distro and won't set it up on anything else you've got. It's like the browser wars of decades ago and today.
- hospitalJail 3y agoIsnt this just a reason to stick with FOSS? This sounds like you have all the disadvantages of linux and all the disadvantages of vendor lock in. Maybe I've been burned by iTunes DRM and short lived WYSIWYG editors, but since then, my tech stack and software needs to be flexible. Better to use a slightly less user friendly experience than to be locked in as the quality deteriorates.
- rilindo 3y agoDepending on the business or OP's role, they may not have a choice in the sofware they support.
- bluedino 3y agoThe catch with switching from RHEL to SUSE (or Ubuntu, or whatever), is what does your vendor support? Big fancy medical records software at the hospital? It used to run on either RHEL or CentOS. They stopped supporting 8. They won't do stream. You only have to buy one Red Hat License (unless you want to run CentOS 7.9 for the next 11-12 months), and it's tiny in comparison to what the actual software license and support costs, and we won't even get into the hardware that you're required to buy.
- thesuperbigfrog 3y ago>> what does your vendor support? Will your vendor be buying RHEL to develop their product? Anyone developing products for RHEL will now need to buy RHEL licenses unless Rocky Linux / Alma Linux are able to maintain 100% compatibility. This will probably make the RHEL ecosystem more expensive for everyone using it.
- totallywrong 3y agohttps://developers.redhat.com/articles/faqs-no-cost-red-hat-enterprise-linux https://developers.redhat.com/articles/faqs-no-cost-red-hat-...
- bluedino 3y ago> The Red Hat Developer Subscription for Individuals is still only available to individuals, not organizations or teams, and is designed for personal servers, home labs, and small open source communities
- TheNewsIsHere 3y agoThat page also makes it pretty clear where Red Hat is going generally. The idea of a business is effectively caged to “enterprise”. Sounds like IBM.
- Hfdlmsh 3y agoThere is a different subscription for "Teams", aka business use.
- jwildeboer 3y agoSUSE gets an ex-Red Hat CEO and decides to offer support for RHEL. Interesting. Seems RHEL is still the gold standard of commercial support ;) DISCLAIMER: I’m a 18 year Red Hatter and know the SUSE CEO since many years.
- yankcrime 3y agoThis announcement predates the new CEO’s appointment.
- zxspectrum1982 3y agoSUSE does not offer support for RHEL but for their own RHEL clone (SLL, formerly and still internally SLES ES). This product has existed for a long long time.
- nerdo 3y agoDHH's experience with SUSE enterprise sales: https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-only-thing-worse-than-cloud-pricing-is-the-enterprisey-alternatives-854e98f3 https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-only-thing-worse-than-cloud-pr...
- agracey 3y agoDHH interacted with a reseller and not directly with SUSE… We have our issues (as does any company selling enterprise support) but this is not an accurate representation.
- jonsger 3y agoAt work we traditionally have almost only SLES servers with some Oracle Linux and RHEL ones. In the last months we gained a few more RHEL servers, which I needed to provide updates for. Our servers don't have internet connection so some sort of mirror server is required. For SUSE we use their free-of-cost RMT (and the older SMT) mirror services. For RHEL something like this doesn't seem to exist or looks a little kludgy. So I bought some licenses for SLL: * there where still some "repo errors" when changing from RHEL to SLL on a existing server * I opened a support ticket, there was no finger pointing to RedHat and one or two weeks later the issue was resolved :) I would say it's at least worth a try.
- Animats 3y agoSo this is basically a support contract deal, correct? Not a distro.