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

[Leinad]

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

Oh, you're right, according to wiki since 42.1. I missed that "news".

[Paradigm Shifter]

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.

Same. SuSE always seemed to be known in Europe, not outside of it. I suppose technically Mandrake was my first distro (came on a magazine cover CD) but SuSE was the first OS I bought a hard copy of, rather than getting preinstalled. Came in an enormous box, on 7 CDs (and 2 DVDs for those lucky ones with DVD drives!) with a Users manual (600-odd pages) and a Administration Guide (1000+ pages...)

I don't miss the days of large boxes for a single CD jewel case, but I do miss the days of getting comprehensive physical manuals with software.

[Jedibeeftrix]

been using it for 17 years now. great distro.

[cen1]

Hmm this might atually make me switch to OpenSUSE.

[zxy_thf]

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 the main reason is Suse doesn't have any trait to distinguish itself from other distros. In other words, Suse family lacks of its "personality".

RHEL/CentOS: old software, but ultra stable, production ready; (Overshadows SLES)
Debian: completely community driven and no single big corp can unplug it; (Overshadows OpenSuse Leap if you only upgrade when current release reaches EOL)
Arch: Rolling release, very aggressive in adopting new software; (Overshadows OpenSUSE tumbleweed)
Fedora: Fast moving, but more stable and newbee friendly than Arch; (Overshadows OpenSuse Leap if you upgrade ASAP)
Ubuntu: Initially with good marketing, but 2-yr LTS release period is the sweet-spot for lots of users. You can keep using the same release for 5 yrs or 10 yrs (paid) if you like; (Overshadows OpenSUSE Leap, in all metrics on lifecycle)
Gentoo: Build everything from SOURCE. -march=native! Cut off any unused modules!

The only thing special I could think of about Suse is KDE, while these distros above (usually) pick Gnome, but during the disastrous release of KDE 4, this might be a disadvantage.

[R41N3R]

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.

My experience is that the installer is one of the bad examples. The installer didn't even load on my Dell XPS 13 for many years (I've never seen this on any other Linux distro), but recently I tried openSUSE tumbleweed again and I was at least then able to boot to the installer. But on the 4k notebook screen it was no fun at all to install openSUSE. The automatic partitioning proposal was not what I expected, there is no option to just use the hole disk, so you first have to understand the proposal and then do it again until it fits your needs.
As I've used encryption, I had to enter my password twice, one time in grub and then again during Linux boot.
After installation I noticed that there are no media codecs installed. So I had to search for a solution and my feeling was that the documentation is not very good to use. When I finally found the instructions, it was overly complicated, lots of text and several commands on the terminal plus some actions in Yast.
As much as I would like to use openSUSE for its stability, btrfs snapshots, automatic distro tools and maintenance, Arch Linux is in many areas ahead like documentation, simplicity and last but not least AUR.
A stupid example is printer installation in openSUSE. You really need to learn do install your printer with Yast and that is not intuitive if you know the KDE printer setup, Cups and driver installation with one command from AUR.
Overall I would hesitate to propose openSUSE to beginners. Maybe openSUSE adoption is hindered the most by lacking focus on the user perspective.

[uxmkt]

I really don't understand why SUSE is so underrated. Some people don't even know that SUSE makes Enterprise Linux. [...] why are they so overlooked?

Some people are just not open-minded enough. My impression of, for example, comment #15 of this thread is that the poster only tried to find reasons as to why (open)SUSE has gone under rather than looking at what could make it stand out.

My quick takeaway is that SUSE is for when: 1. you don't like spending time with rebuilding Gentoo from source regularly, 2. you don't like the Debian discussions or its package manager, 3. you don't like the RedHat way of additional software via cumbersome SCL, Streams and /opt shenanigans, 4. the (IMO) technically juvenile community surrounding Ubuntu.
But people just don't care enough. Few even build their own computer, so what do you expect of their ability to make an educated analysis of multiple distributions.

[czerw]

After installation I noticed that there are no media codecs installed. So I had to search for a solution and my feeling was that the documentation is not very good to use. When I finally found the instructions, it was overly complicated, lots of text and several commands on the terminal plus some actions in Yast.

Not sure which guide was followed, but adding repository with additional codecs is action with two zypper commands (ar + dup) and no action in Yast is needed.

https://en.opensuse.org/Additional_package_repositories#Packman