[HN Gopher] SUSE targets pre-summer IPO
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SUSE targets pre-summer IPO
Author : stryan
Score : 118 points
Date : 2021-03-12 16:11 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| z9e wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| openSUSE is my daily OS, mostly because the Packman repository
| is so comprehensive.
| pelasaco wrote:
| A lot of the mainframes out there are running SUSE. SUSE for
| S/390.
| ghaff wrote:
| Way back, SUSE had something like 90% of the Linux
| marketshare on IBM mainframes. IBM's initial Linux work on
| the platform was done in Germany (Bohlingen I believe.) That
| eroded over time as Linux on the mainframe went more
| mainstream and Red Hat added similar mainframe support
| features to what SUSE had.
| usr1106 wrote:
| Bohlingen? I have never heard about such an IBM location.
|
| Maybe you meant Boblingen. That used to be a big research
| and development site since the days of punched cards until
| its shutdown was announced 2 years ago. They did a lot of
| zSystem stuff, no idea whether anything with SUSE.
|
| Disclaimer: I was a trainee at another IBM research site
| long before Linux was invented. So I cannot reveal any
| internals about the topic.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm sure you're right which is why I couldn't confirm it
| on Google.
|
| Example: https://newsroom.ibm.com/Bringing-Linux-to-IBM-Z
| This is very politically partner-agnostic but a lot of
| the work was specifically around SUSE in the early days.
| hitpointdrew wrote:
| I 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.
| Cu3PO42 wrote:
| While 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.)
| adamcstephens wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| kubeadm is in the repo for years meanwhile.
| dologatag wrote:
| "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.
| __coaxialcabal wrote:
| Not that I've used it in several years, but Teradata and
| AsterData used to run on SUSE. It was extremely stable in my
| experience.
| bobthecowboy wrote:
| Both definitely still did as of the end of October when I
| worked at Teradata.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| I use it everyday! I work in a highly regulated industry and
| for some reason it's the only "validated" distribution that we
| could get approved to run internal web apps. I'm pretty sure
| that's false, but I'll take any Linux I can get over Windows,
| and its tools for system management are actually pretty great.
| waiseristy wrote:
| A relatively recent development, but OpenSUSE is shaping up to
| be one of the preferred distros for automotive embedded linux
| applications.
| cpach wrote:
| Aha. Perhaps they have some kind of collaboration with
| Porsche/Volkswagen or Opel...?
| waiseristy wrote:
| Not sure about those OEMs, but Daimler definitely is
| working with them. These German brands really really like
| to use German software
| nudpiedo wrote:
| I've seen in a few datacenters in Europe. At the end companies
| decide based on license and support more than tech.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Does anyone have any anecdata where they've seen it most
| heavily used?
|
| Continental European enterprises.
| strictnein wrote:
| Yep. SAP utilizes it, for instance.
|
| When I was there, my laptop was a ridiculously overspec'd
| Windows system (with a high end Nvidia Quadro for unknown
| reasons), and they had us run a SUSE VM with IntelliJ for our
| dev environment.
| iso8859-1 wrote:
| YaST (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 wrote:
| Back 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/
| trollied wrote:
| I thought SAP bought them a while ago. Looks like I'm wrong. No
| idea where I got that from :(
| strictnein wrote:
| Both German and SAP utilizes them a fair amount.
| jvalencia wrote:
| I'm curious if anyone knows why SUSE is going IPO?
| pelasaco wrote:
| my guess is: Investors want to make a good exit and then try to
| sell it to SAP.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Perhaps 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| If 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 wrote:
| We 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 wrote:
| This makes me wonder. What Linux does Google run? I'm
| guessing Debian.
| ghaff wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| They used to use their own Ubuntu variant for desktops,
| but switched to their own Debian variant.
|
| And ChromeOS is based on Gentoo IIRC.
| [deleted]
| hu3 wrote:
| I'm looking forward to https://rockylinux.org/
|
| By the same author of CentOS and promises to be 100% bug-
| for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| > _IBM pretty much removed RedHat from the market_
|
| Could you please elaborate on this?
| mrweasel wrote:
| If you wanted to invest in a Linux company, RedHat was the
| go to company. Now that means buy IBM stock.
|
| I should have written: Removed RedHat from the stockmarket.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| That makes more sense. I thought it meant that IBM is
| sunsetting RedHat Linux distro.
| Aboh33 wrote:
| Also 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
| GNU_James wrote:
| Who? That's not how you spell Debian.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| as 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 wrote:
| >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.
| nix23 wrote:
| I want that for Hardware too, well i want free stuff
| everywhere. As someone GNU you should understand the
| difference of free beer and free software.
| mariusor wrote:
| You might have some muddled conceptions about what free in
| "free software" stands for. Spoilers, it's not the cost.
| cognaitiv wrote:
| So 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 wrote:
| Micro 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 wrote:
| There 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Don'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-...
| ghaff wrote:
| The whole business of Novell retaining the copyrights to
| UNIX when they transferred other rights to SCO may have
| been the most weird twist of a generally surreal case.
|
| I wonder if we'll ever really know the whole backstory
| here. SCO pretty clearly messed up big time but did their
| lawyers just screw up or did SCO decide this was a detail
| to be dealt with later?
| azinman2 wrote:
| Quite frankly I'm surprised they still exist. Is it mostly
| European contracts? You never really hear about SUSE anymore...
| aplanas wrote:
| SUSE bought Rancher in 2020, and that was also in the news.
| _wldu wrote:
| They once had one of the best KDE desktops available.
| throw2737 wrote:
| Opensuse still does. Kubuntu or Fedora are far behind.
| Shared404 wrote:
| OpenSUSE is my go to for when I want a KDE desktop. I just
| change the color scheme, and everything is good to go.
| space_ghost wrote:
| I 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.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Googling 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.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Walmart is going BIG on Kubernetes (like, 100% full-
| throttle), so they might need to get struck from this list
| soon...
| beberlei wrote:
| SUSE bought Rancher though, so they are all into Kubernetes
| too
| the_why_of_y wrote:
| How does that follow?
|
| https://www.suse.com/solutions/kubernetes/
| dan_quixote wrote:
| Continental Europe was by far their largest market just a
| couple years ago. North American expansion was always a
| matter of discussion (if not investment) but it has only
| really picked up steam in the last year or so.
| dralley wrote:
| I believe Lowes (Hardware) also.
| Shared404 wrote:
| Can confirm Lowes.
|
| I didn't find an unlocked workstation inside. And I
| definitely didn't play with one.
| barkingcat wrote:
| _You_ hardly hear about them, doesn 't mean they don't exist.
|
| SUSE is a large distribution based in Germany, in Europe they
| have significant inroads in government contracts.
| azinman2 wrote:
| I didn't say they didn't exist, but clearly it's not just me
| who never really think about them:
|
| https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=U.
| ..
| krylon wrote:
| Last time I checked, a number of Cray supercomputers were using
| it in some capacity.
| ghaff wrote:
| They'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).
| unixhero wrote:
| This is great for Linux
| speakspokespok wrote:
| Somewhere 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.
| codegeek wrote:
| Circa 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| krylon wrote:
| Me too, but 2000/2001 - I still have the box and the CDs. SuSE
| Linux 7.0 Personal Edition.
|
| I did not anticipate how much of an impact on my life that was
| going to have.
|
| TL;DR - Go Suse! (-:
| txutxu wrote:
| CDs 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.
| thetopher wrote:
| Just to add another tale from the past:
|
| Sometime in the late 90s I ordered a Red Hat CD from
| cheapbytes.com (CD burners weren't common yet). I didn't have
| a credit card yet, but I did have a checking account, so I
| paid for the order by mailing in a check.
| codegeek wrote:
| "CD Burners"
|
| Yep. They used to be premium in the 90s and even early
| 2000s. I remember how you were special if you had a CD
| burner on your computer instead of a regular CD Player :).
| Kinda like difference between a VCP and VCR for even older
| kids.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Agreed. I have dozen books on Linux in my home office and of
| course there's the Internets...
|
| But I've never ever found something so cohesive,
| comprehensive,understandable and with a great guided curve. I
| kept them long past obsolescence as they just couldn't be
| replaced by anything better :-/
| tazjin wrote:
| +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 ...
| pimeys wrote:
| Definitely better than me asking help to install some
| pre-1.0 KDE beta in an IRC channel somewhere in the 90's.
| Some helpful hacker asked me to give them the root access
| so they could install KDE for me. I guess that's how I
| learned about not trusting everybody...
| groundthrower wrote:
| My first experience with Linux was also after ordering their CD
| package... maybe around 5 discs? I almost remember first time
| ever logging in through the terminal after installation. Wow
| bengale wrote:
| I remember getting my grandad to buy me a copy of SUSE from
| pcworld back around that time. I completely destroyed my home
| pc trying to install it, but I learned a lot putting all that
| right.
| Klonoar wrote:
| I remember buying SUSE in a damn Best Buy. What a world...
| aplanas wrote:
| > Fun times
|
| Is still fun! There is Tumbleweed, a full rolling distribution
| (all packages with its own update cadence, and OBS fully
| building the dependencies that are impacted). There is also
| MicroOS, a transactional OS (BtrFS subvolumes for rootfs are
| read-only, and the update happens in the snapshot that will be
| activated after the reboot, providing a self-healing system
| when an upgrade does not affect the running environment)
|
| Also Leap, but this is indeed boring (15.3 will be based fully
| in SLE binaries)
| krylon wrote:
| What goes around, comes around - I am writing this comment on
| a laptop running Tumbleweed, with another one running Leap
| 15.2 sitting next to me.
|
| Coming back to Suse was a bit like coming home. (-:
| nix23 wrote:
| >Coming back to Suse was a bit like coming home.
|
| Oh that's so true, i started with 7.2 or .1, but never
| worked well, so i switched to mandrake, then a ~decade
| Debian, and now back (about 2years ago) to OpenSuse Leap
| (but with XFS as / and just on the laptop) everything else
| FreeBSD.
| TheCondor wrote:
| It really feels like there is a Suse renaissance happening.
| MicroOS is particularly interesting.
|
| I wish them nothing but success, now that IBM has RHEL, maybe
| SLES will get new attention.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| Was it SUSE that had tetris (or maybe pacman) available while
| the CD installer was running?
| pelasaco wrote:
| that was Caldera!
| ibejoeb wrote:
| Wow, never would have recalled that on my own, but now I've
| got vivid memories of the unix lab...
| nix23 wrote:
| Suse has a special bootloader around Christmas:
|
| https://siasky.net/NACTymsHp70KBDeyHDUlyO-
| XHW6nMidXO-4PM4aYy...
| raverbashing wrote:
| In 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
| skrtskrt wrote:
| It seems like Linux desktop is more popular and close to legit
| than ever.
|
| I think the gaming -> PC building pipeline is getting people
| educated and interested in the nitty gritty of their home
| computers, plus there are more people exposed to Linux now than
| ever just through a giant and growing industry of software
| devs.
| arbitrage wrote:
| the linux desktop has existed and been usable for twenty years.
|
| if you want a windows desktop, buy a windows license.
|
| if you want linux to look like windows, well then yeah ...
| you're going to be disappointed.
| amarshall wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| We 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 wrote:
| Linux desktop is pretty great for devs. Just like Linux server.
| dralley wrote:
| Desktop isn't profitable
| oblio wrote:
| It not as profitable as mobile? Maybe. But there are
| companies selling billions of dollars of desktop software
| and desktop software subscriptions.
| Shared404 wrote:
| For example Valve.
|
| They basically lost me due to DRM, but got me back with
| Proton.
| robszumski wrote:
| With containers you now have a ton of Linux userlands running
| around, so you need a sane system for dealing with that. For
| the container runtimes and cgroup features, you still need a
| distro that maintains this stuff correctly. cgroups v1 to v2 is
| gonna be rough for some folks.
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