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I am cautiously optimistic. From the article: > Both SUSE’s Management and Supervisory Boards have expressed support for the strategic opportunity presented by

I am cautiously optimistic. From the article: > Both SUSE’s Management and Supervisory Boards have expressed support for the strategic opportunity presented by this delisting. They believe that it will enable SUSE to concentrate on its operational priorities and the execution of its long-term strategy without the pressure of public markets. Lets hope their incentives more strongly align with their customers, now. I am a huge SUSE fan, been using their products for 15 years. What they've been doing the last 5 or so has been almost unparalleled in the Linux space.

wlesieutre 3y ago
Don't know that I've ever been optimistic about a company being purchased by private equity. Anyone have counterexamples where that turned out well for customers? The justification sounds good, but they'd say something like that even if the plan was "squeeze money out of the company at the expense of users and customers and reputation."
- deaddodo 3y ago
  Many could argue that Dell improved substantially after its 2013 transition to private ownership. At least, from the consumer perspective, things improved drastically. Linux support, a wider variety of competitive lines with much needed improvements to legacy lines, adoption of AMD for CPUs/GPUs, etc. I can't speak of their server/enterprise business, however.
  - profwalkstr 3y ago
    I think Dell went downhill after the acquisition, their hardware quality is junk all across their line: servers, workstations, laptops, monitors, etc. Every device from them that I had my hands on recently have, at best, terrible build quality, and at worst, multiple failures. And their support is a bad joke.
    - ethbr1 3y ago
      My experience was limited to laptops and monitors, but hardware's been good and service has been excellent. Honestly, it reminded me more of early-Amazon customer support, than anything more recent. E.g. support agent following up with a personalized email to me to make sure everything worked out okay with a warranty claim. Talking to humans was novel and pleasant. That was on the consumer side though.
      - Spooky23 3y ago
        It’s all about the tier of support. At work we bought 20k laptops and screwed up the support spec. So we ended up with some garbage tier support that wouldn’t fix issues caused by Dell docks. You have to have “ProSupport” We also have a region where they have a 2 hour support SLA with part in hand. They will literally put your computer down to fix ours to avoid whatever punishment that gets meted out. Back in the day a guy was collocated.
        walterbell 3y ago
        ProSupport is amazing, especially on Dell hardware on eBay which still has extended coverage remaining that can be transferred. Immediate phone connection to knowledgeable and helpful technicians.
        axus 3y ago
        International warranty transfer has been Dell's killer feature for me.
    - deaddodo 3y ago
      That's the complete opposite of my experience. I bought an XPS 15 (it supported Linux well) and broke the screen (my own fault) about 8mos into owning it. Spoke to support and they sent a technician over two days later. They replaced the screen, tested it and were on there way 40mins later, all for free.
      - ssnistfajen 3y ago
  - qbasic_forever 3y ago
    I dunno, looking at dell.com now all I see are bad CGI mockups of products and "AI" boldly slapped everywhere. It looks like trash and nothing like the Dell I used to use and own 20 years ago. I almost think the company is entirely fake and produces nothing based on their site today.
- TylerE 3y ago
  When Warren Buffet bought Berkshire Hathaway in 1962, he rapidly turned it from a failing textile company into a monster. Not private equity exactly, but he personally bought up 51% of the shares.
  - lmm 3y ago
    > When Warren Buffet bought Berkshire Hathaway in 1962, he rapidly turned it from a failing textile company into a monster. It's not like he improved their textile business. He took the name as a shell for his investment activities. > Not private equity exactly, but he personally bought up 51% of the shares. That's the opposite of the "without the pressure of public markets" situation though. He was doing quarterly reporting and answerable to shareholders (in some ways more answerable than a CEO who doesn't own the majority of shares - there are specific protections for minority shareholders).
  - plorkyeran 3y ago
    Buffet bought Berkshire Hathaway entirely out of spite and has said that it was the worst investment he's ever made. The textile company continued to do poorly under his ownership, and shut down nearly 40 years ago.
- est31 3y ago
  It's the same PE firm which owned SUSE before, orchestrated the IPO, and now, still a majority shareholder, buys the minority shares back. If you bought in at any time between the IPO and May of this year, you'd be in for losses, so it's certainly not been an unprofitable move for them. But it's not the classical "foreign vulture PE comes in and destroys everything" situation here that people seem to be afraid of.
- Stranger43 3y ago
  The basic problem that gives private Equity firms a bad reputation is that winding down an fading company that have fundamentally stopped growing over a 3-5 year lifespan, is a pretty good way of getting a good return on investments so it happens a lot to downward sloping companies with enough of an nostalgia inducing brand to be newsworthy. It’s not the only ways PE companies make money sometimes they do actually allow companies to thrive on the long term by letting them escape the short term thinking that some stock traders demand but those tend to fly under the radar as well it’s not as newsworthy as some beloved brand turning to dust over a 5 year time span. EQT the company in question here bought SuSE from Novell for a song listed it on the stock market in 2021 for a pretty decent profit and is now buying back stock at about half what they sold it for in 2021, so is itself kind of an counterexample to the narrative that PE firms always destroy what they buy.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  I have no idea. However are their examples of companies that went public where it turned out well/better for customers? I can't name a single example.
rgrieselhuber 3y ago
I used to run SUSE about 20 years ago and have always thought it was cool but haven't kept up with it much since then. What are some of the things they do that make them unparalleled?
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  Tumbleweed, the only "pro" rolling distro that gets proper testing. And other stuff like Rancher but I never used it, and I'm sure there's more.
- kergonath 3y ago
  Rock-solid distros with packages that keep with the times and that are as user-friendly as it gets for Linux installs. Both Tumbleweed and Leap are great. We have far fewer issues in my lab since we replace CentOS with Leap (our experiments with Ubuntu were dreadful and we cannot babysit the computers so anything with complex maintenance is right out). Going all rolling release was a step too far, too much of a culture shock, but we might switch to Tumbleweed in a couple of years if the stability remains as it is now.
- deaddodo 3y ago
  I ran SUSE around the same time (2001-2002ish), because it was the only major distro (between RH and Mandrake, primarily) that would install on my archaic 128MB PII. Debian worked but my grade school brain had no capacity for setting up Xfree86 manually. I stuck to SUSE for about 1.5 years before switching to Mandrake (and, eventually, Fedora Core) on my new Athlon XP desktop. My nostalgia for them will probably always be strong.
  - koyote 3y ago
    Sounds like we pretty much had the same Linux story! I started with SuSE 7 (purchased it!), then Mandrake, then Fedora, then Ubuntu, then Arch and now reluctantly back on Xubuntu because I can't get my laptop to sleep properly on Arch... Do you remember why you switched from SuSE? I only have vague memories but I feel like the package manager might have been a bit clunky? Maybe I should give openSUSE another go, I really dislike Ubuntu's 'ads' and snap.
rvz 3y ago
> Lets hope their incentives more strongly align with their customers, now. Private equity is incompatible with "optimism" and "hope". Even worse when it is the same company that got them listed in the first place, implying that going public was a mistake.
- johnbellone 3y ago
  Or they feel it is undervalued and they want to ride the upside solo.
- hliyan 3y ago
  I've been hearing a lot about private equity lately (particularly from folks who used to pursue VC money in the past). Can you expand a bit on the negatives of PE?
  - slater 3y ago
    Not op, but as i understand it: they swoop in, load up the company with debt, fire lots of people, then go "oh, fiddlesticks.. whelp, what can ya do??" and throw up their hands as the company inevitably crumbles. Citation: Read up on how Toys'R'Us was put through that wringer. Edit: actually, here's a good write-up: "Less attention was paid to the albatross that Bain, KKR, and Vornado had placed around the company’s neck. Toys “R” Us had a debt load of $1.86 billion before it was bought out. Immediately after the deal, it shouldered more than $5 billion in debt. And though sales had slumped before the deal, they held relatively steady after it, even when the Great Recession hit. The company generated $11.2 billion in sales in the 12 months before the deal; in the 12 months before November 2017, it generated $11.1 billion." Article: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/toys-r-us-bankruptcy-private-equity/561758/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/toys-r-... Archive link: https://archive.is/OH9QF https://archive.is/OH9QF
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - brightlancer 3y ago
totallywrong 3y ago
> What they've been doing the last 5 or so has been almost unparalleled in the Linux space. Can you elaborate please?
deleted 3y ago
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SgtBaker 3y ago
Well this was pretty expected as it's how EQT normally operates - they purchase objects - develop them for x-years (normally about 5-ish) before re-selling or re-listing. They've been in SuSE since 2018 - so the IPO was their try at exiting, but since it didn't work out, they're probably going a different route (couple of more years of development, then selling to someone else). Melissa Di Donato, the SuSe ex-CEO is wife of Darren Roos, CEO of IFS (huge Enterprise Software company) - who are also owned by EQT. EQT tends to invest heavily in their development objects, so it's probably a good thing - but they are also very adamant on timely progress, so good luck to all SuSe oldtimers who are still with the company - it's going to be another roller coaster. Let's see if the next try gets them somewhere.
BizarroLand 3y ago
I am ambivalent and withholding judgement. Hopefully this is a process to protect SUSE from greedy VCs who want to capitalize any value they can get their hands on, but it could also be a long-con process to punish SUSE for daring to fork Red Hat at their organizational level.

wlesieutre 3y ago

Don't know that I've ever been optimistic about a company being purchased by private equity. Anyone have counterexamples where that turned out well for customers? The justification sounds good, but they'd say something like that even if the plan was "squeeze money out of the company at the expense of users and customers and reputation."

deaddodo 3y ago
Many could argue that Dell improved substantially after its 2013 transition to private ownership. At least, from the consumer perspective, things improved drastically. Linux support, a wider variety of competitive lines with much needed improvements to legacy lines, adoption of AMD for CPUs/GPUs, etc. I can't speak of their server/enterprise business, however.
- profwalkstr 3y ago
  I think Dell went downhill after the acquisition, their hardware quality is junk all across their line: servers, workstations, laptops, monitors, etc. Every device from them that I had my hands on recently have, at best, terrible build quality, and at worst, multiple failures. And their support is a bad joke.
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    My experience was limited to laptops and monitors, but hardware's been good and service has been excellent. Honestly, it reminded me more of early-Amazon customer support, than anything more recent. E.g. support agent following up with a personalized email to me to make sure everything worked out okay with a warranty claim. Talking to humans was novel and pleasant. That was on the consumer side though.
    - Spooky23 3y ago
      It’s all about the tier of support. At work we bought 20k laptops and screwed up the support spec. So we ended up with some garbage tier support that wouldn’t fix issues caused by Dell docks. You have to have “ProSupport” We also have a region where they have a 2 hour support SLA with part in hand. They will literally put your computer down to fix ours to avoid whatever punishment that gets meted out. Back in the day a guy was collocated.
      - walterbell 3y ago
        ProSupport is amazing, especially on Dell hardware on eBay which still has extended coverage remaining that can be transferred. Immediate phone connection to knowledgeable and helpful technicians.
      - axus 3y ago
        International warranty transfer has been Dell's killer feature for me.
  - deaddodo 3y ago
    That's the complete opposite of my experience. I bought an XPS 15 (it supported Linux well) and broke the screen (my own fault) about 8mos into owning it. Spoke to support and they sent a technician over two days later. They replaced the screen, tested it and were on there way 40mins later, all for free.
    - ssnistfajen 3y ago
- qbasic_forever 3y ago
  I dunno, looking at dell.com now all I see are bad CGI mockups of products and "AI" boldly slapped everywhere. It looks like trash and nothing like the Dell I used to use and own 20 years ago. I almost think the company is entirely fake and produces nothing based on their site today.
TylerE 3y ago
When Warren Buffet bought Berkshire Hathaway in 1962, he rapidly turned it from a failing textile company into a monster. Not private equity exactly, but he personally bought up 51% of the shares.
- lmm 3y ago
  > When Warren Buffet bought Berkshire Hathaway in 1962, he rapidly turned it from a failing textile company into a monster. It's not like he improved their textile business. He took the name as a shell for his investment activities. > Not private equity exactly, but he personally bought up 51% of the shares. That's the opposite of the "without the pressure of public markets" situation though. He was doing quarterly reporting and answerable to shareholders (in some ways more answerable than a CEO who doesn't own the majority of shares - there are specific protections for minority shareholders).
- plorkyeran 3y ago
  Buffet bought Berkshire Hathaway entirely out of spite and has said that it was the worst investment he's ever made. The textile company continued to do poorly under his ownership, and shut down nearly 40 years ago.
est31 3y ago
It's the same PE firm which owned SUSE before, orchestrated the IPO, and now, still a majority shareholder, buys the minority shares back. If you bought in at any time between the IPO and May of this year, you'd be in for losses, so it's certainly not been an unprofitable move for them. But it's not the classical "foreign vulture PE comes in and destroys everything" situation here that people seem to be afraid of.
Stranger43 3y ago
The basic problem that gives private Equity firms a bad reputation is that winding down an fading company that have fundamentally stopped growing over a 3-5 year lifespan, is a pretty good way of getting a good return on investments so it happens a lot to downward sloping companies with enough of an nostalgia inducing brand to be newsworthy. It’s not the only ways PE companies make money sometimes they do actually allow companies to thrive on the long term by letting them escape the short term thinking that some stock traders demand but those tend to fly under the radar as well it’s not as newsworthy as some beloved brand turning to dust over a 5 year time span. EQT the company in question here bought SuSE from Novell for a song listed it on the stock market in 2021 for a pretty decent profit and is now buying back stock at about half what they sold it for in 2021, so is itself kind of an counterexample to the narrative that PE firms always destroy what they buy.
prmoustache 3y ago
I have no idea. However are their examples of companies that went public where it turned out well/better for customers? I can't name a single example.

rgrieselhuber 3y ago

I used to run SUSE about 20 years ago and have always thought it was cool but haven't kept up with it much since then. What are some of the things they do that make them unparalleled?

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
Tumbleweed, the only "pro" rolling distro that gets proper testing. And other stuff like Rancher but I never used it, and I'm sure there's more.
kergonath 3y ago
Rock-solid distros with packages that keep with the times and that are as user-friendly as it gets for Linux installs. Both Tumbleweed and Leap are great. We have far fewer issues in my lab since we replace CentOS with Leap (our experiments with Ubuntu were dreadful and we cannot babysit the computers so anything with complex maintenance is right out). Going all rolling release was a step too far, too much of a culture shock, but we might switch to Tumbleweed in a couple of years if the stability remains as it is now.
deaddodo 3y ago
I ran SUSE around the same time (2001-2002ish), because it was the only major distro (between RH and Mandrake, primarily) that would install on my archaic 128MB PII. Debian worked but my grade school brain had no capacity for setting up Xfree86 manually. I stuck to SUSE for about 1.5 years before switching to Mandrake (and, eventually, Fedora Core) on my new Athlon XP desktop. My nostalgia for them will probably always be strong.
- koyote 3y ago
  Sounds like we pretty much had the same Linux story! I started with SuSE 7 (purchased it!), then Mandrake, then Fedora, then Ubuntu, then Arch and now reluctantly back on Xubuntu because I can't get my laptop to sleep properly on Arch... Do you remember why you switched from SuSE? I only have vague memories but I feel like the package manager might have been a bit clunky? Maybe I should give openSUSE another go, I really dislike Ubuntu's 'ads' and snap.

rvz 3y ago

> Lets hope their incentives more strongly align with their customers, now. Private equity is incompatible with "optimism" and "hope". Even worse when it is the same company that got them listed in the first place, implying that going public was a mistake.

johnbellone 3y ago
Or they feel it is undervalued and they want to ride the upside solo.
hliyan 3y ago
I've been hearing a lot about private equity lately (particularly from folks who used to pursue VC money in the past). Can you expand a bit on the negatives of PE?
- slater 3y ago
  Not op, but as i understand it: they swoop in, load up the company with debt, fire lots of people, then go "oh, fiddlesticks.. whelp, what can ya do??" and throw up their hands as the company inevitably crumbles. Citation: Read up on how Toys'R'Us was put through that wringer. Edit: actually, here's a good write-up: "Less attention was paid to the albatross that Bain, KKR, and Vornado had placed around the company’s neck. Toys “R” Us had a debt load of $1.86 billion before it was bought out. Immediately after the deal, it shouldered more than $5 billion in debt. And though sales had slumped before the deal, they held relatively steady after it, even when the Great Recession hit. The company generated $11.2 billion in sales in the 12 months before the deal; in the 12 months before November 2017, it generated $11.1 billion." Article: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/toys-r-us-bankruptcy-private-equity/561758/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/toys-r-... Archive link: https://archive.is/OH9QF https://archive.is/OH9QF
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - brightlancer 3y ago

totallywrong 3y ago

> What they've been doing the last 5 or so has been almost unparalleled in the Linux space. Can you elaborate please?

deleted 3y ago

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deleted 3y ago

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SgtBaker 3y ago

Well this was pretty expected as it's how EQT normally operates - they purchase objects - develop them for x-years (normally about 5-ish) before re-selling or re-listing. They've been in SuSE since 2018 - so the IPO was their try at exiting, but since it didn't work out, they're probably going a different route (couple of more years of development, then selling to someone else). Melissa Di Donato, the SuSe ex-CEO is wife of Darren Roos, CEO of IFS (huge Enterprise Software company) - who are also owned by EQT. EQT tends to invest heavily in their development objects, so it's probably a good thing - but they are also very adamant on timely progress, so good luck to all SuSe oldtimers who are still with the company - it's going to be another roller coaster. Let's see if the next try gets them somewhere.

BizarroLand 3y ago

I am ambivalent and withholding judgement. Hopefully this is a process to protect SUSE from greedy VCs who want to capitalize any value they can get their hands on, but it could also be a long-con process to punish SUSE for daring to fork Red Hat at their organizational level.