I was wondering "What about Canonical" but it looks like SUSE's annual revenue is about 4 times that of Canonical, and of course SUSE requires a contract to get patches etc. where Ubuntu doesn't.
I'd be curious what the difference in the install base is like.
Considering Suse has Walmart, Kroger (and their QFC, Fred Meyer, etc subsidiaries), Safeway/Albertsons, and numerous European & African chains using SLES as the base of their retail systems, they likely sell many more support contracts.
SLES has pushed deep onto back office computers and embedded devices like deli scales, which ia a big stretch from where it started (as an IBM 4690 OS replacement).
Isn't Canonical also operating at a loss even after it's massive success? I don't think I've seen anything definitive about it's success as a commercial offering, but I can say I rarely meet commercial Canonical consumers but I regularly meet commercial SUSE and RedHat customers.
If Canonical is sold, I doubt it would be for nearly as much as SUSE or RHEL. The general consensus seems to be that Ubuntu is for new users, while SUSE and RHEL are for serious customers, and that's far more important than most other features from an enterprise perspective (nobody ever got fired for choosing RHEL/SUSE).
And yeah, I also would be very interested in the paying install base.
Personally, I'm switching to SUSE because there's a supported path from Tumbleweed to SUSE, and Ubuntu has caused me far too much pain for me to trust them with my money and my business. Ubuntu just doesn't seem to know what it wants to be when it grows up, and that's a problem that SUSE and RHEL have solved long ago.
Personally, I admire the fact that openSUSE polishes KDE and GNOME (Xfce4 as well) pretty well, satisfying details, really makes the effort to make the distro more user friendly and easy to use. However, I wouldn't use it as personal workstation distro (I currently run Arch Linux and Fedora 29, I wouldn't mind running Manjaro, Kubuntu/Xubuntu or Debian).
I have been under the impression that SUSE has kept changing ownership since Novel took over (then Attachmate, merger with Micro Focus, now sold), never settled, it's simply a a risk to many businesses running Linux with commercial support.
During my tenure with Citrix (XenServer team), the product team made a big decision to switch dom0 (not just the kernel) from SLES 11 (I could be wrong about the release) to CentOS 7, which I personally thought was the right move. Don't want to talk about XenServer rebrand and what happened to the free edition here (simply search xcp-ng as alternative).
NOTE: In the past 11 years working in Australia, I have never seen a single production system running on SLES (I've seen Gentoo though). Above doesn't mean openSUSE/SLES isn't a great Linux distro.
> I have been under the impression that SUSE has kept changing ownership since Novel took over (then Attachmate, merger with Micro Focus, now sold), never settled, it's simply a a risk to many businesses running Linux with commercial support.
Absolutely not - this just proves that there's no commercial risk involved.
Red Hat was recently bought as well, which unlike the SUSE sale might actually have an impact on the company.
Why do people seem to give SUSE the cold shoulder? I haven't tried it (see?) but I've never really heard anything bad about it. A quick poke suggests the software packaging situation for it is excellent as well.
Every time I've tried to use it, as a desktop, it just wasn't great. Edit: let me clarify. It just didn't work great out of the box. Maybe it was hardware problems, or general weirdness and brokenness, but it felt "off".
IDK. I'm in the process of switching, and so far everything has been pretty smooth. I'm currently weaning myself off Arch, and honestly, OBS has been a sufficient replacement for the AUR, and Tumbleweed is reasonably nice to use. I'm also switching my servers from FreeBSD and Debian to Leap, and again, it's pretty smooth.
My only major fear is that BTRFS is going to eat my lunch, but it's also improving as well, so that's becoming less and less of a worry. I'm watching ZFS on Linux as well, but neither SUSE nor RedHat seem interested in jumping on the bandwagon, so I'm holding off.
openSUSE seems quite nice, and I agree with most of the decisions that they make. Honestly, I don't know why I didn't use it until now...
And they fail so much it is painful to watch. Strangely in capitalism the fit will sell themselves when able to get a really sweet deal. But the unfit will "survive" in some sense as "independent" units.
[+] [-] Twirrim|7 years ago|reply
I'd be curious what the difference in the install base is like.
[+] [-] metildaa|7 years ago|reply
SLES has pushed deep onto back office computers and embedded devices like deli scales, which ia a big stretch from where it started (as an IBM 4690 OS replacement).
[+] [-] beatgammit|7 years ago|reply
If Canonical is sold, I doubt it would be for nearly as much as SUSE or RHEL. The general consensus seems to be that Ubuntu is for new users, while SUSE and RHEL are for serious customers, and that's far more important than most other features from an enterprise perspective (nobody ever got fired for choosing RHEL/SUSE).
And yeah, I also would be very interested in the paying install base.
Personally, I'm switching to SUSE because there's a supported path from Tumbleweed to SUSE, and Ubuntu has caused me far too much pain for me to trust them with my money and my business. Ubuntu just doesn't seem to know what it wants to be when it grows up, and that's a problem that SUSE and RHEL have solved long ago.
[+] [-] terrywang|7 years ago|reply
I have been under the impression that SUSE has kept changing ownership since Novel took over (then Attachmate, merger with Micro Focus, now sold), never settled, it's simply a a risk to many businesses running Linux with commercial support.
During my tenure with Citrix (XenServer team), the product team made a big decision to switch dom0 (not just the kernel) from SLES 11 (I could be wrong about the release) to CentOS 7, which I personally thought was the right move. Don't want to talk about XenServer rebrand and what happened to the free edition here (simply search xcp-ng as alternative).
NOTE: In the past 11 years working in Australia, I have never seen a single production system running on SLES (I've seen Gentoo though). Above doesn't mean openSUSE/SLES isn't a great Linux distro.
[+] [-] Vogtinator|7 years ago|reply
Absolutely not - this just proves that there's no commercial risk involved. Red Hat was recently bought as well, which unlike the SUSE sale might actually have an impact on the company.
[+] [-] terrywang|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] externalreality|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sarcasmatwork|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dTal|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SamReidHughes|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beatgammit|7 years ago|reply
My only major fear is that BTRFS is going to eat my lunch, but it's also improving as well, so that's becoming less and less of a worry. I'm watching ZFS on Linux as well, but neither SUSE nor RedHat seem interested in jumping on the bandwagon, so I'm holding off.
openSUSE seems quite nice, and I agree with most of the decisions that they make. Honestly, I don't know why I didn't use it until now...
[+] [-] ilovecaching|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amdavidson|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vmlinuz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ewams|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] etaerc|7 years ago|reply