[HN Gopher] The History of S.u.S.E
___________________________________________________________________
The History of S.u.S.E
Author : ibobev
Score : 209 points
Date : 2025-02-14 13:53 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.abortretry.fail)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.abortretry.fail)
| whalesalad wrote:
| My first introduction to linux was SuSE 7.2. Got it in the
| physical box from a local Borders bookstore. I think I was about
| 12-13 years old. Installed it on the family Gateway computer
| (PIII, 128mb ram).
| mtillman wrote:
| My boss had me install SuSE 4.? but I reverted to Slackware
| after a few months. Yast was pretty cool from what I recall.
| johng wrote:
| Slackware was my first distro as well... want to say kernel
| was around 0.94 or thereabouts.
| whalesalad wrote:
| I played around with slackware a ton. And mandrake (before
| mandriva). And OG fedora (still have some Fedora 1 DVD's
| somewhere, from a magazine)
|
| All of them sucked imho. Switched to Debian when lenny was
| released and haven't looked back. My current workstation is
| Debian 12 and it is a rock solid workhorse.
| quink wrote:
| SuSE 6.3 for me. With the handbook and everything on CDs it's
| the sort of introduction to Linux as physical artifacts that
| you had to deal with. It defined a life-changing experience
| that's near impossible to avoid. Because you sure weren't able
| to pull a Docker container of any size in two seconds flat, you
| weren't able to Google for whatever (Linux Documentation
| Project was the only website worth visiting), and what you had
| was what you had, none of this having the latest from github at
| any time.
|
| It was nice to have these limitations that forced you to sit
| down and just be with it, free of all the distractions and
| doubts that arise from always seeing the latest on Hacker News.
| You knew it was good, you knew you had it all, and you could
| make the world your oyster with ancient Perl and PHP,
| documentation and all included right there on those CDs.
| mongol wrote:
| My first PC was a used IBM PS/2 Model 70. 2 MB RAM, 60 MB HD.
| It could not run Linux due to the MCA bus. I lost one year of
| Linux use because of it, until I bought a Pentium 75.
| Bootvis wrote:
| I have a very similar experience but using 6.4 installed from 6
| (six) CD's.
|
| Took me forever to get internet working, first dial-up then
| ISDN.
| mattl wrote:
| Yeah I used to love the era of boxed Linux distros with manuals
| in bookstores and computer stores.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| I remember fondly my first brush with SuSE around 2005, and I
| was blown away how polished and professional it was. I was a
| Red Hat user then and later moved on to Ubuntu so I found the
| YaST based bit foreign to my taste. Those were the days of wild
| distro-hopping.
|
| Pentium 4, 128MB RAM
| lycopodiopsida wrote:
| I still have a full box of SuSE 7.3 on my shelf, the first (and
| only) Linux disto I've bought. :)
| jmclnx wrote:
| Very informative, I knew Slackware Translation was the first
| product, but I did not know how they went from Slackware to their
| own distro.
| happyweasel wrote:
| IMHO, Deutsche Linux-Distribution (DLD) was the first german
| linux distribution (first release in 1992).
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| So it's not just a meme that Germans like to put "Deutsche" in
| front of every product/company name, it's the reality. How
| imaginative, the marketing departments who come up with these
| names must be making bank.
| skrebbel wrote:
| I mean, Americans put "National" in front of everything. At
| least the German version suggests some level of awareness of
| a world beyond the borders.
| vondur wrote:
| National is generic, but many companies in the U.S. include
| America in their name.
| weinzierl wrote:
| Last time Germans put a _National_ in front of an
| organization it did not go so well.
|
| Similar with _Reich_ but surprisingly there are still a
| couple of things starting with _Reich_ , like the
| Parliament building is still called _Reichstag_ even if
| there is no _Reich_ no more.
|
| Americans use _National_ mostly when things are
| uncontroversially national _and_ international. For
| mostly national and controversially international things
| they prefer _World_ , like World Series, WCW, WFL.
| Tomte wrote:
| > the Parliament building is still called Reichstag even
| if there is no Reich no more
|
| "Reich" isn't a Nazi thing. The building was already
| called that decades earlier. It goes back to the last
| German emperor, and Reich actually means empire. The
| Roman Empire is also called Romisches Reich.
| bregma wrote:
| The World Series is a contest between the National League
| (which is only American teams) and the American League
| (which has international teams).
|
| Other international sports leagues with teams in the USA
| include the National Basketball Association and the
| National Hockey Association.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| It's generic only if the context isn't implied. In e.g.
| NBA, NHL etc. "national" means "American".
| pvitz wrote:
| That the distribution was a fully translated system together
| with a thick manual (of course also in German) was the whole
| point and idea. Your comment is too dismissive in my opinion.
| Tomte wrote:
| The manual was pretty much a Linux for beginners book. It
| not only explained installation and basic system
| administration, but had substantial vim and Emacs chapters,
| as well as a chapter on retro gaming using emulators. (SuSE
| 5.3 in my case).
| Sweepi wrote:
| Well who ever came up with "Deutsche Linux-Distribution" most
| likely did not have a marketing department.
|
| Besides, putting "German" in your product name at the time
| (199x) actually was a savvy marketing move, especially if you
| are the first in a particular niche. There were lots of
| buyers who wanted to buy fully translated software back then,
| and the sticker "Software and Manual in German" probably is
| the most successful sale booster of the 80ies and 90ies in
| Germany.
|
| This of course does not even touch the subject of
| localization issues, just to name 2 from the top of my hat:
|
| [1]For years (maybe a decade?) Apple maps had issues if you
| tried to enter an address the "German" way: <Streetname>
| <Number> instead of <Number> <Streetname>.
|
| [2]To this day websites ask me for "states" in my shipping
| address. Yes, Germany has states. We mostly dont care about
| them. No one puts the state in a shipping address. Shops,
| please stop getting annoyed when I dont know if you expect me
| to enter a 2-or 3-length string as abbreviation for my state
| (which you dont need for anything, anyway). VAT is a federal
| tax, therefore its not different from state to state.
| dep_b wrote:
| The Netherlands had that system as well. But entering the
| number first is faster: the number needs to be exact, but
| the street can be autocompleted easily.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Every country does.
|
| American Express
|
| British Telecom
|
| Etc
| layer8 wrote:
| It literally just meant a Linux distribution with German
| localization.
| ta1243 wrote:
| So it's not just a meme that Americans like to slap a flag on
| everything they import from China, it's the reality. How
| imaginative, the marketing departments who come up with these
| names must be making bank.
| mdip wrote:
| I've been a user of openSUSE since "openSUSE", nearly. It's my
| daily driver, today.
|
| I want to say I was playing with Mandrake, Red Hat and a little
| Gentoo at the time. I started using it regularly around 2010ish -
| I was working at a Windows shop and had a pretty elaborate home
| lab with Windows servers and domain controllers so I could do
| things at home "before trying that on corporate." I remember the
| deciding factor became "I can use YaST to add this device to my
| domain controller and login with domain credentials easier than I
| can add a Windows box to the domain." And I found that was often
| the theme with _many_ tasks, whether they 're unusual like
| "logging into a Windows host" or mundane. Over the years, the
| software options available have been pretty incredible. I run
| Tumbleweed in most places and it's, by far, the smoothest
| "bleeding edge rolling update" distribution I've worked with.
| `Snapper` was my first experience with "working rollback."
|
| Because of the fine folks at openSUSE, I went from "knowing
| nothing about Linux" to "using it as my primary desktop" and I'm
| mostly a .NET developer. So many development tasks are just
| _easier_ to do under Linux, whether it 's the pesky node or
| python module that needs gcc/LLVM to compile some dependency and
| the expansive set of software repositories and available `.rpm`s
| make it all very straight-forward.
|
| I recently picked up a higher-end AMD GPU and was dismayed to
| find that ROCm support was limited, mostly, to Ubuntu[0]. I got
| everything mostly working in Tumbleweed -- interestingly, most of
| the AI workloads I put it through worked as well in Tumbleweed as
| they did in Ubuntu following the official documentation but a few
| of the ROCm utilities didn't run. I ended up reloading with
| Ubuntu and quickly regretted the situation. Stupidly, I assumed
| doing a distribution update would be flawless like it typically
| is with Tumbleweed. After all, the only way to actually _update_
| Tumbleweed is via a distribution update, and 2K packages later it
| very rarely fails to boot. I knew right away that I wouldn 't
| have the safety of being able to pick the previous snapshot but I
| was surprised that when it failed half-way through it didn't
| bother to roll anything back; it simply left my machine in a
| broken state that booted directly to a text console. Having re-
| loaded this box four times in the prior few days, I decided to go
| back to what I knew.
|
| About the only complaint I have centers around their default
| choice of `btrfs` for the filesystem. While I like the CoW
| functionality (the only particular "advanced" feature that I
| utilize with `btrfs`), it seems to excel -- mostly -- at teaching
| me about filesystem recovery. My home lab isn't anywhere near as
| elaborate as it had been in the past. It seems even on a UPS with
| proper shutdowns it's ridiculously prone to getting itself into a
| state where a `btrfs restore` is the only way to recover from a
| filesystem problem. Every single time I get everything back
| except for some random cache/tmp/log file but I need to dig up or
| purchase a volume of equal size to restore it to, meaning I have
| to keep around an empty drive at least as large as my largest
| volume. It seems to me "if the filesystem can literally restore
| everything except for a file or two that has become corrupted" it
| should offer a "dangerous" option to do so online. To this day I
| have never had to restore everything from an actual backup, it's
| _always_ gotten back everything important simply restoring the
| broken filesystem to a new volume and the filesystem becomes
| corrupted without explanation -- power didn 't fail, the system
| had a clean shutdown, it just randomly goes "read-only" with a
| guarantee that the next boot will drop to an emergency console.
| Unfortunately, CoW helps a _lot_ with the work I do and ends up
| being worth the grief involved. While I 've had fewer failures in
| the last couple of years and an easier time recovering from those
| failures, it's often a full day's work to get everything right,
| again.
|
| [0] Support exists for Leap but the repositories were broken for
| a solid month while I was setting things up.
| ghaff wrote:
| FWIW, I believe btrfs is also the default FS for Fedora these
| days (though not Red Hat Enterprise Linux).
| BSDobelix wrote:
| True but SUSE (the enterprise version) is pretty clear about
| the use of btrfs, just use it for the OS (snapshots), the
| "data" partition should always be XFS.
| ghaff wrote:
| AFAIK (though not as connected to Red Hat storage team
| these days), RHEL is pretty much XFS plus logical volume
| managers. As I understand it, ZFS was just a non-starter
| because of licensing + Oracle and the feeling was that
| btrfs just wasn't quite there.
| darkwater wrote:
| > I want to say I was playing with Mandrake, Red Hat and a
| little Gentoo at the time.
|
| I don't know when you started playing with all of these and for
| how long, so it can be absolutely how you said (in the end,
| it's your own life!) but chances are you mostly used Mandriva,
| since the Mandrake name disappeared in 2005.
| kergonath wrote:
| I can't all for the parent obviously, but my experience is
| similar and I was using Red Hat and Mandrake around 1999.
| dizhn wrote:
| No snapper, no rollbacks without btrfs I'm afraid.
| Levitating wrote:
| I can't believe YaST is that old
| Deeg9rie9usi wrote:
| Don't forget about LST: https://www-lst-
| de.translate.goog/de/main.php?id=02&_x_tr_sl...
| usrusr wrote:
| Which later became Caldera Deutschland and played a bit of a
| role in Caldera Open Linux. And which happened to have its
| offices well within commuting range of everything SuSE. I've
| been wondering about local connections ever since I recognized
| the Caldera sign on that building (back in the 20th).
| riedel wrote:
| Does somebody remember Halloween Linux as another German
| translation [0]. Still have some CD ROM lying around.
|
| [0] https://www-pro--linux-
| de.translate.goog/artikel/2/364/hallo...
| dmacvicar wrote:
| I worked there for more than a decade, and I can never highlight
| enough:
|
| - How great the place was for those involved in the open-source
| ecosystem
|
| - How great Novell and Attachmate were as owners
|
| The company had, like many others, good and tough times, but the
| people were very passionate about it.
|
| I will never stop feeling lucky for it being part of me for so
| many years.
| mugsie wrote:
| I was only there for a year or two, but it was a great place to
| work, and I 100% agree on the upstream contributors, but the
| main thing I will remember is how much people cared.
|
| In some cases, waaayyy too much about little things, but a lot
| of the time about the right thing to do for the product and for
| the open source community around it.
|
| I think the main thing I will miss is sitting down on a Friday
| afternoon and reading the dev list (devel@ I think?), it was a
| thing of beauty.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| "How great Novell and Attachmate were as owners"
|
| Could you elaborate on that? What made them great?
| jasoneckert wrote:
| I agree that Novell was great for SUSE back in the day.
|
| I co-wrote 6 academic textbooks with Novell on SUSE Linux
| Enterprise Desktop and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for
| Thompson / Course Technology, and I have fond memories of the
| whole team at Novell during that time.
|
| Each time I was asked to write another textbook for Novell on
| SUSE, the publisher used YaST (Yet another SUSE Textbook) in
| the subject line of the email.
|
| Oh, and yes, SUSE is a great distro!
| jeffbee wrote:
| Why is it written as an initialism as if you would pronounce each
| letter individually? At least for English speakers, that's not
| the way, right?
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| The original name of the company was S.u.S.E. with the dots.
| "Software- und System-Entwicklung" (Software and system
| development)
| Tomte wrote:
| Similar: CoDeSys (Controller Development System). They also
| decided to leave the original meaning behind and rebranded to
| the all-caps CODESYS.
| skrebbel wrote:
| > Software- und System-Entwicklung
|
| Wow that's like naming your cleaning company "Cleaning
| Company"
| omnibrain wrote:
| Well, SAP initially stood for "Systemanalyse
| Programmentwicklung".
| BSDobelix wrote:
| Like OpenAI or IBM....or the best one..Oracle for a
| Database ;)
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Like OpenAI
|
| About "Course of Theoretical Physics" by Lev Landau and
| Evgeny Lifshitz
|
| > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Course_of_Theoretical_Phy
| sics
|
| it is said (also quoted on the Wikipedia page):
|
| "not a word of Landau and not a thought of Lifshitz".
|
| Similarly, one could say that OpenAI is named this way
| because it's neither open nor intelligent.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| Or like MicroSoft - Microcomputer Software.
| BSDobelix wrote:
| Microsoft is a least correct but:
|
| OpenAI = Not Open
|
| IBM = International Business Machines with NON
| international character encoding (EBCDIC).
|
| Oracle = NOT what you want from a database nor from a CIA
| project ;)
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Wow that's like naming your cleaning company "Cleaning
| Company"
|
| ... or naming your boring company "The Boring Company".
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Or a company for developing software for microcomputers
| Microsoft?
| jeffbee wrote:
| Yeah but do they say "ess oo ess ee" or "suess"?
| Tomte wrote:
| Soo-seh. Like the women's name.
| bregma wrote:
| "soo zuh"
| CopperWing wrote:
| https://youtu.be/nLdexZlVkAY?feature=shared
| Deeg9rie9usi wrote:
| It's [su:z@]
| simmons wrote:
| Wow, the mention of SLS takes me back. SLS was the first Linux
| distribution I ever used. (Not counting the very early days of
| manually extracting tar archives of userspace binaries to make a
| system...) I remember passing around the precious shoebox of SLS
| floppies from person to person in high school. :)
| humptybumpty wrote:
| Seems like it wasn't just you: it was the first proper Linux
| distro in the world:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution
| ashears wrote:
| SUSE is a strong partner for my managed products, and every
| person I have worked with there has been skilled and good people.
| tombert wrote:
| SUSE has always been this perennial figure in the Linux world for
| me; the Linux Distro that isn't talked about often, but is
| generally liked and respected, by most people who use it.
|
| I ran OpenSUSE for about a year in 2013-2014, and it did sort of
| have the Just Works nature to it: things did more or less what I
| expected them to do without much tinkering. It was the first
| Linux that I liked enough to be my _sole_ operating system
| instead of dual booting, which should say something by itself.
|
| I stopped running OpenSUSE because I bought a new laptop which
| had Nvidia Optimus, and someone told me that that was easier to
| get working with Arch, so that's what I did, and I haven't really
| touched SUSE since, but I will always respect it for getting me
| interested in Linux and open source.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| I picked OpenSUSE as my personal desktop 15 years ago because
| its YaST confuguration module helped with administration. Same
| positve experience, apart from the occasional hiccup updating
| NVIDIA proprietary drivers.
| tombert wrote:
| Yeah, the reason I used OpenSUSE is that someone told me that
| YaST was more or less analogous to the Windows Control Panel,
| and that SUSE was relatively friendly for people who had
| mostly used Windows. I think that description is fairly
| accurate, I didn't really much trouble navigating around
| SUSE.
|
| I'm an annoying math person now so I use NixOS for
| everything, and I don't really plan on leaving any time soon,
| but if I did SUSE would honestly still be a contender.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| openSUSE is neat! If only I could actually update it from 15.4 to
| 15.5 without getting a Curl error. :(
| sodaplayer wrote:
| I got a soft spot for SUSE. In the late 2000s, Novell partnered
| with my highschool to teach a certification class, so it became
| the distribution I cut my teeth on if you don't count my time
| playing with compiz window effects on a free Ubuntu live-disk in
| junior high.
| adam_gyroscope wrote:
| SuSE doesn't get enough credit for the quality of the
| distribution. Transactional updates, serious work towards a
| reproducible distribution, nano as an excellent container
| runtime, stability under large workloads - it's a nice piece of
| engineering.
| eitally wrote:
| These are some of the reasons -- besides being German, probably
| -- that it's one of just a couple of Linux distros certified by
| SAP.
| hulitu wrote:
| > SuSE doesn't get enough credit for the quality of the
| distribution
|
| Maybe now. 7.2 had a bug where they showed one unit when
| partitioning drives and used another one when writing to disk.
| Ask me how i find out.
| terinjokes wrote:
| I think I've encountered bugs in every distro's installer
| from 24 years ago. Fortunately, in 86box it's less painful
| than I imagine you went through.
| stryan wrote:
| > nano as an excellent container runtime
|
| Out of curiosity, are you referring to MicroOS? I know they're
| written some container tools like catatonit but I haven't heard
| of nano.
| BSDobelix wrote:
| I like openSUSE, but the predictability is dirt poor (which is
| why I don't use it for servers...or anything else).
|
| About two years ago, LEAP was supposed to be canned for this new
| shiny thing, since then...nothing. So, dear openSUSE, should I
| install openSUSE Leap? Wait for the "new" thing, is this "new"
| thing also free or what? Or you know what? I have a better
| idea...I just install Debian or FreeBSD (community based, no
| endless reselling, no corporate overlord, clear messaging).
| dismalaf wrote:
| Kind of agree with this take. Suse was my first distro (got a
| box set of the commercial distro in the early 00's), but it's
| been unpredictable, sometimes bug laden, unclear direction, and
| during that time Debian has become not just better but also
| easier to use...
|
| Flatpak and Flathub mean almost any distro is suitable for a
| home user, so now what I look for is stability and how easy it
| is to install and use dev tools. Everything runs and works on
| Debian, I've found openSuse to have more bugs.
| TomMasz wrote:
| Wow, I haven't seen Yggdrasil mentioned in a long time. In the
| early 90s, one of the guys at work tried to install it on a 386
| PC. They never quite succeeded. Just a couple of years later I
| was running SuSE at home, after having started with Red Hat. The
| improvement in the distributions in that short amount of time was
| impressive.
| nezirus wrote:
| SuSE was my first Linux system and it helped a lot to spark my
| interest. Yast (software manager) and SaX (XFree86 configuration
| tool) were a Godsend for a noob like me in 199x.
|
| It's still solid today, and I hold it in high regards, even if I
| moved to greener Linux pastures.
| Propelloni wrote:
| I see what you did there :)
| sgt wrote:
| YaST was pretty clunky but rock solid!
| cgio wrote:
| My first Linux system too. Back when downloading a distro was
| hard with available bandwidth, I got it boxed, with quite a few
| manuals included in the box! Still have them somewhere
| alongside my copies of free x86 documentation from Intel.
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| SuSE 5.1 (only a light version that came with a magazine) and
| 5.3 was the first linux distro that I really liked. YaST was
| really great to install anything from the 6 cdroms. I have yet
| the copy.
| vondur wrote:
| I remember using the Novel SLD distro back in the day. It was
| really polished.
| MrDrMcCoy wrote:
| I honestly love OpenSUSE. About the only negative thing I can say
| about it is that zypper, an otherwise perfect package manager, is
| really, absurdly slow.
| davidw wrote:
| The photo looks like it's an 80ies synth-pop band.
|
| Also, "Sure, one could download all forty Slackware floppy disk
| images, but it would take quite a bit of time on a 28.8kbps
| modem"
|
| Yes...yes it does.
|
| On a more serious note, I miss the days when Linux and open
| source software where on the rise. Things weren't perfect, but
| there was a lot of idealism and a desire to build cool stuff and
| the whole "tech bro" thing wasn't what it is today.
| pjmlp wrote:
| After Red-Hat and Mandrake, it became my favourite home distro
| until Ubuntu came into the scene.
|
| Still have the SuSE 6.3 box, like it used to be common in those
| days.
|
| Yast is a great tool, and SusSE is one of the few distros that
| isn't stuck in the 1970's view of what means OS administration.
|
| Also an ideal candidate for the upcoming age of siloed countries,
| stuck in commercial wars.
| gbil wrote:
| 6.3 was when I jumped to SuSE and yast was a revelation at the
| time. On the other hand I jumped away from SuSE later because
| of the many custom ways of doing things.
| kergonath wrote:
| > After Red-Hat and Mandrake, it became my favourite home
| distro until Ubuntu came into the scene.
|
| I fucking loved Mandrake. And Red Hat on a PowerMac. It was a
| challenge but it was very rewarding when it worked. I had the
| opposite trajectory after that, though. I tried Ubuntu when it
| was new and shiny but ran into so many issues... Now I have
| been using OpenSuse continuously for about 6 years without
| complaint. Even the usual (though much rarer than it used to
| be) sticking point of Nvidia drivers are trivial to deal with
| by restoring snapshots.
| kjs3 wrote:
| I used SuSE for many years as my daily driver, and it was
| generally a very nice ride, and I have/would recommended it to
| others. I got away from it a few years back because I was always
| hitting _something_ I wanted to install that was "we know about
| Debian and Redhat...everything else you're on your own". I think
| I remember the last-straw was getting a video-in card and
| associated OSS HDTV software running...fought for a while with
| SuSE and Debian 'Just Worked'. If I had more time to build-from-
| source this probably would have been a non-issue, but if I'm
| going to get a new hobby building everything from source, there
| are probably a couple of other distros I should look at.
|
| I should definitely revisit it...I keep running into "the Debian
| + Backport version of this software is _just a little_ too out of
| date for what you want to do " and Ubuntu has pissed me off in
| other, more annoying ways too many times.
| psankar wrote:
| I worked there for a few years during the Novell/Attachmate
| management. They had a strong bias towards the kernel teams and
| engineers. They had an european work culture and some very good
| leads. Their Engineers were very good. The internal mailing lists
| were ripe with technical discussions. Got some amazing friends
| and inspirational engineers with whom I would love to work again.
|
| However, There were infighting between the GNOME and KDE desktop
| teams. The VPs were mostly overpaid and practically useless. The
| constant churn of acquisition, looking for a new buyer, etc. did
| not help their long term cause.
|
| With the older system software (kernels, compilers, etc) and
| infra layer getting commoditized I wonder how long they may
| remain relevant. When they brought in a new CEO and acquired
| Rancher I hoped that they may recover with K8S etc, but the CEO
| has quit and the acquisition has not done much it seems. Until
| they remove some dinosaurs from the old management at VP levels,
| I honestly do not see any recovery for them. Thumbs up for the
| Engineering (and leads) and heavy thumbs down for the Management,
| is how I remember my time there.
| BSDobelix wrote:
| > and heavy thumbs down for the Management, is how I remember
| my time there.
|
| This is exactly what is reflected to the public with their
| flappy and sloppy unpredictability of product lines (openSUSE
| that is).
|
| LEAP is beta/rc for Enterprise -> LEAP is now based ON
| Enterprise -> LEAP will be canned for NEW thing just Tumbleweed
| for community in the future -> Nothing about new thing but new
| LEAP are still published -> Community still wants something
| like LEAP, creates Slow-roll Tumbleweed in fear of SUSE still
| canning LEAP...maybe? -> Now, no news about EOL of LEAP, no
| "new thing", but Slow-Roll for Tumbleweed...what a Clown-
| show...
|
| SUSE/openSUSE you are terrible in messaging, like chickens on
| meth with a new brain-fart every two month.
|
| Nothing against the Dev's but the C-suite and Marketing should
| probably be replaced, those ping-pong announcements is the
| opposite from what someone wants from a Distro.
|
| Really openSUSE why should anyone use LEAP for a professional
| project if there is a really big chance that in 3-4 years a
| complete re-installation/migration is needed? Or is it not? I
| don't know, also pretty sure you don't know too. So fck it i
| use Debian/Ubuntu/FreeBSD or Slackware hell even Oracle-Linux,
| literary anything else is more predictable longterm.
|
| You guys have no technical problems but a trust and
| communication one.
| rickspencer3 wrote:
| Son of a gun! I've been working at SUSE for a bit of a year, and
| a lot of the positive things people say here still ring true, at
| least to me.
| dark-star wrote:
| One thing I always found awesome is that even the very first
| versions, like "Linux Aktuell 4.x" from 1996 or so, already had
| full support for Braille terminals during installation.
|
| That made SuSE very usable for blind people, even installable,
| while for other operating systems you always needed someone to
| set the system up for you (and probably still do).
|
| I am not blind personally (and I don't know anybody who is), but
| I still found that a fascinating thing to do (I assume they knew
| someone who was blind and required that support?)
| bkaindl wrote:
| I was working at S.u.S.E. at the time (in 1998) and there was a
| guy (I think he was an employee, but I might be wrong) on site
| who was blind, he and made sure the Braille terminals worked;
| yes I think also during installation.
| patwolf wrote:
| I was always blown away by the fact that YaST could run either as
| a GTK app or a CLI/ncurses tool. The same config was available in
| both.
|
| Back when I was using SuSE regularly, I was developing a
| pluggable web-based admin tool. I always wanted to look at the
| way YaST was written to see if I could do something similar for
| creating a web UI, but my project got sidelined before I got very
| far.
| albertzeyer wrote:
| I think this was my first (or among my first) Linux
| distributions, around 2000 or so. I did not had Internet access
| back then. I had some coding experience (mostly Basic; I was just
| learning C++). I made a dual installation with Windows. I don't
| really remember the details anymore, but I struggled with really
| using it, and after I played around with it (maybe it lead to
| some system freeze and then I did a cold restart), at some point
| it would not boot anymore. But also, I was not really learning
| anything about how it works, and did not really understand too
| much. I think I also tried Red Hat later but had similar
| experience.
|
| Then some time later, I got Internet access, and I read about
| Gentoo, and the tutorial to install it from scratch was really
| well written and easy to follow, and that helped me really a lot
| in understanding how Linux really works, what components are
| involved in the whole system. I continued using that for many
| years. Whenever there was some problem, I was able to understand
| it and fix it.
|
| Nowadays, I just want to use sth which is so widespread that it
| is very well supported, and I can expect that any problem can be
| found on the Internet with some solution, and sth where I just
| need to spend only a minimal amount of effort to keep it running
| and up-to-date, so I chose Ubuntu (already couple of years ago;
| not sure if my choice today would be the same, but for now I
| stick to it). So this is sth which basically just works. But I
| wonder, for a newcomer who really wants to understand how Linux
| works, I think I would rather recommend Gentoo or Arch Linux or
| so. I think I also prefer the rolling release concept (Arch,
| Gentoo) over the point release development model (Ubuntu, Debian,
| Suse, Slackware, etc).
| e40 wrote:
| One thing not made clear in that history was their role in ARM
| Linux. There was a guy there, I forget his name (I think it was
| Andy). We learned a lot about making an ARM compiler for CL from
| him. He really was the, at the low level, the one that help make
| ARM Linux happen.
|
| Anyone remember his name? Definitely would like to give him a
| shout out.
|
| It might have been Andreas Farber.
| Cockbrand wrote:
| And then there was /usr/bin/zast as a symlink pointing to
| /usr/bin/yast - just in case you had a DIN keyboard, but the
| matching keymap hadn't been loaded.
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