The Unified Path Ahead For Building SUSE Linux Enterprise + openSUSE Leap

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Unified Path Ahead For Building SUSE Linux Enterprise + openSUSE Leap

Red Hat hasn't been the only major enterprise Linux distribution shifting around their pieces with regards to how RHEL is formed with moving to CentOS Stream as its future upstream. Over the past year especially openSUSE Leap and SUSE Linux Enterprise having been moving closer together with the source trees now being more closely aligned between Leap and "SLE". SUSE has published an insightful blog post series detailing the prior way that openSUSE Tumbleweed and Leap tied in with SUSE Linux Enterprise and then the direction they have been shifting...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=SLE-Leap-Building-Together

[skeevy420]

Well, I think:

SUSE Tumbleweed > SLE + OpenSUSE

is a lot less complicated than:

Fedora > CentOS Stream > RHEL

Heck, they all have SUSE in their names for one thing

[silviumc]

I really don't understand why SUSE is so underrated. Some people don't even know that SUSE makes Enterprise Linux. They are quite a good distro, they make significant contributions to Linux, why are they so overlooked?

[CochainComplex]

I really don't understand why SUSE is so underrated. Some people don't even know that SUSE makes Enterprise Linux. They are quite a good distro, they make significant contributions to Linux, why are they so overlooked?

I guess it depends where you live. Here in Germany it is rather well know...but for obvious reasons. BTW it was my first distro.

[etam]

I really don't understand why SUSE is so underrated. Some people don't even know that SUSE makes Enterprise Linux. They are quite a good distro, they make significant contributions to Linux, why are they so overlooked?

I'd like to know it too. For example here on Phoronix there are often news about upcoming changes in Fedora, but no such news about openSUSE. That's probably a question directly to Michael. Is openSUSE not worthy for news? Or is it just that Fedora makes something better in communication?

[bofkentucky]

Their lack of US mindshare is a shame. When Novell owned them they really tried to market to all those legacy netware sites, but most had moved on to AD/Exchange by the time. You used to get free SLES licenses with your Cisco UCS purchases as well and it still hasn't made a dent in RHEL.

[whitecat]

I really don't understand why SUSE is so underrated. Some people don't even know that SUSE makes Enterprise Linux. They are quite a good distro, they make significant contributions to Linux, why are they so overlooked?

Because it lacks an equivalent of CentOS.

[Davonious]

I've been trying SUSE since the CentOS fiasco, and have been relatively impressed with it. I appreciate some of the changes, and others I just wish they would document better. The other thing is that I find the SLES forums (at least the English ones) are like a ghost town at times. Way too many unanswered questions to give one comfort.

[Leinad]

I really don't understand why SUSE is so underrated. Some people don't even know that SUSE makes Enterprise Linux. They are quite a good distro, they make significant contributions to Linux, why are they so overlooked?

I think it is due to very poor management. SuSE was KDE distro, after Novell buy, it went for Gnome. Novell invested in new applications in Mono, which is only poor copy of .NET, instead of GTK/Qt. Novell went into controversional patent agreement with Microsoft, which forced of creation GPL 3 as a consequence. After desktop is not succesfull, they abandoned most of desktop development. They fired most of openSUSE team when crisis hit the world. Recently, they changed many times release model - from random release, to release every 8 months, to introduce Tumbleweed, to introduce Leap 42 with release every year, introduction of new version Leap 42.1 which has some packages older than previous openSUSE 13.2, than release new leap after less than year, then change versioning again in Leap 15. Leap 42.2 was refresh version with many packages updates, Leap 15.2 was refresh version, but with many packages left old. No consistency, no predictability.

Open days in Czech SUSE company was similar disaster. I was "fan" of SUSE (now partialy dissapointed fan), so I invited my friend when open days event in that company appeared on facebook. How it was? Four SUSE employees went to open days to welcome us, all of them apologized with they forgoten about open days. Three of them at least tried to use some old presentation to say something. The last guy only said, he is tester lead and he is looking to forward to do a boss to a new employee. It is easy guess, that it dit very poor impression on my friend.

But. But technically it is good distro! Installer is so much better than in other distros. I want to cry when try to Fedora or Kubuntu installer. Great gui package manager, YaST in GTK, Qt, terminal version. Both good KDE and Gnome integration. Probably first gui automatic testing (now in other distros too). Tumbleweed with older snapshost repositories, so you can avoid broken releases. Btrfs so way ahead, that Fedora btrfs integration looks like a joke. They have very hard focus on security. Etc...

So, why it feels so underrated? Because great programming guys and poor management guys.

P.S.: I have some hope for a new openSUSE management guy, which do feedback surveys and development meetings and discuss needed improvements.

[useless]

[...] YaST in GTK [...]

I thought that the GTK frontend was abandoned a while ago.