SUSE Liberty Linux: secure your Linux future without fear of vendor lock-in.

[toyg]

The actual announcement: 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.

[jzb]

SUSE 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.

[carlosrg]

> 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.

[0xbadcafebee]

SuSE'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]

Interesting… 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.

[itpcc]

It 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]

Came here to say the same thing. "Liberty"... I'm using a Pihole to block trackers.

[yonatan8070]

It works fine for me on Android, in a private Firefox tab, with uBlock Origin and a PiHole

[thesuperbigfrog]

All 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]

I thought SLES is paid as well?

[krylon]

A 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]

I'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.

[jonsger]

At 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.

[candiddevmike]

Didn'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.

[jacooper]

This was announced in 2022, not a response to red hats recent decision.

[ilyt]

...just use Debian. Soooo much less fuss than any of the "enterprise" ones.

[SoftTalker]

But if your commercial or scientific software is only supported on RHEL or SLES then you can't just "use Debian."

[jwildeboer]

SUSE 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.

[zxspectrum1982]

SUSE 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.

[yankcrime]

This announcement predates the new CEO’s appointment.

[bluedino]

The 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]

>> 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.

[oneplane]

This is why I try to avoid healthcare and banking etc. Too much legacy vendor stuff which is hard to modernise. This whole "supported distro" stuff wouldn't matter if they just packaged their software in the shape of a container, even with container persistence. No more "required" distros. They would probably still have some CPU feature requirements and maybe a kernel version support range.

[EwanToo]

This is from 2022, not a response to this months Redhat announcements?

[Animats]

So this is basically a support contract deal, correct? Not a distro.

[nerdo]

DHH's experience with SUSE enterprise sales: https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-only-thing-worse-than-cloud-pr...

[agracey]

DHH 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.

[sylware]

developer/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]

Everyone 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.

[photonbeam]

Red hat’s lock-in is in certifications for various software and situations. Suse is a genuine competitor in this space

[jmclnx]

Missed again, was meant for story:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36573872