SUSE Liberty Linux Announced For Mixed Linux Environments

[luizluca]

Enterprise? SLE/Leap

These two needs more details. It is like RHEL/"CentOS from the good old days", but with the same binary (not simply recompiled) and a supported option to switch between the two if need/not need paid support (I think they will not bother to support you even before the switch as long as the affected SW is not an extra opensuse pkg). SUSE simply gives the option you need, not forcing you to buy anything you don't care.

And you are missing one important feature: cheapest support price for VM envs (at least 3 years ago). An now with a RHEL flavor, it is even cheaper. I run an env with a mix of SLES, a couple of RHEL and Windows servers. This news simply will cut my RHEL payments. I think my existing SLES subscription got Liberty covered but even if I needed to pay an extra subscription, it will already be cheaper (and simpler).

[libv]

Doesn't it have to do with its Microsoft past? Or maybe it's still the case.

That statement amazes me...

The suse lore is as follows:

SuSE was often almost bankrupt in the early 2000s. Red Hat had looked at its books and passed on it, hoping to guzzle up the leftovers soon.

Novell was sitting on a load of cash from a slowly dying business, and wanted to buy itself into this new linux thing. So they bought Ximian in 2003 and were surprised to find that this was not "linux", just a bunch of folks writing GUI things. IBM then stepped in, at a time where there were still people at IBM who remembered the MS-DOS debacle and who swore never to depend on a single software supplier ever again (my guess is that most of them retired by now), and nudged Novell towards buying SuSE. So it did in 2004.

Of course, since Ximian employees were at novell first, some key figures were installed in privileged positions inside suse, and suse was forced to downsize its KDE support, a staple of the distribution since forever.

Then microsoft came aknockin in 2006 and said "We have patents!". Novell then unzipped and showed the size of its patents, and then microsoft promised to buy 60 million worth of SLE licenses over 5 years, and promised not to sue Novell/SuSE over its patents.

Red Hat found that miraculously the main competition had risen from the dead, with a big wad of cash in the back pocket, and 12 million worth of extra revenue on top.

And then the shitthrowing started... Luck had it that RMS had wanted to rewrite the GPL to tackle the Tivo and similar practices at the same time, and the MS patent deal ended up being mashed in with it.

To me, it is amazing how some people still seem to tie SUSE to microsoft today, 16 years later. That's exactly like remembering Hilary Clinton for benghazi.

This was a standard big .us business style software patent deal. And this deal took the fangs out of the long looming patent threats that had been pretty prominent in the first half of the 2000s. And you will find that the likes of red hat and canonical went down the same path a few years later, but by then no-one gave a toss. Perhaps because the primary benefactor of the shitthrowing was now doing the exact same thing itself.

The fact that Novell defended us all against the SCO patent troll, and then started open invention network, no-one remembers that it seems.

Disclaimer #1: I hate Novell. I joined SUSE in 2007, freed ATI, got smeared as well, and got tossed (the day after fosdem-09) out when Novell decided in the financial crisis to also make SUSE nuremberg bleed, and that suse had to lower costs by 3M yearly. In the second management speech of the 2008 christmas party we got told that "we have 1B in the bank and nothing to worry about", even though planning for layoffs had started way back in august. An utterly short-sighted move, as the SUSE books were in the black 6 months later, while still in the middle of the credit crunch, and had lost some serious talent amongst the 23 developers (and only developers) it let go.
Disclaimer #2: I hate software patents, and attended demos in front of the eu parliament around 2004.

[skeevy420]

Since the thread is going this way: For me, the problem with SUSE has always been using RPMs. For whatever reason I've never liked working with RPMs and RPM-based distributions. At the end of the day, no matter what technical superiority SUSE may have I don't care for the package management. And that sucks because I'm a KDE user and SUSE (Tumbleweed) has one of the best KDE experiences around.

From and end-user perspective: 20 years ago noob and now, I never really understood why I would want to pick the SUSE ecosystem over the Red Hat ecosystem. When you're a novice and comparing the two from lists and charts and faqs they're basically the same outside of the default desktop environment. By "basically the same" I mean similar package management and package versions.

I've never felt that SUSE has sold to me why they're special and why I should use them. At the end of the day, both them and Red Hat basically offer enterprise. Why is your enterprise better than their enterprise? Frankly speaking, Red Hat hasn't sold to me either but I see their name enough in ads and press that it's a recognizable brand. Ditto with Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, and Manjaro. I don't think I've ever seen a single SUSE ad and they're not very prominent in the news outside of niche Linux sites like Phoronix.

I also think SUSE has a problem with branding. Red Hat is smart about RHEL, CentOS, and Fedora all having different, distinct names for different, distinct purposes. SUSE has SUSE, OpenSUSE, and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed-- similar names for different purposes. IMHO, SUSE needs to drop the Open. Simplify it to two editions: Regular and Rolling; not: Same, OpenSame, and Rolling. Copy Red Hat. Make SUSE free for regular people with only forum/community support. Offer paid support for those that need it. Simplify the ecosystem. It lowers the barrier for entry.

I suppose the biggest difference is advertising and branding. I feel like Red Hat does a much better job getting the word out and making their products more distinct. Heck, even their negative press is good press because a 30 page forum bicker-fest about Cent helps to constantly keep Red Hat on our minds. Plus for every "they do XYZ bad" someone will reply "they do ABC right".

[foxhound]

Agree with skeevy420 . In same time when Red Hat is screaming everywhere that they did this or that SUSE seems to be hiding somwhere behind with premeditation. This is not because RH is lying, they did really much in that time. For example lets take all that work done by Martin Stransky who enabled hardware video acceleration in Firefox, the thing that so many people waited so long. This guy works for RH.
Moreover as for now RH seems to signpost the future technologies in the area. I'm talking mainly about Wayland. They said that they moved their resources from xorg development to Wayland. And what happened? xorg stalled. There are more examples.
But SUSE of course is not passive in this area. Their people also take part in projects, I can remember the one I saw was SUSE employee Jean Delvare who contributed to it87 kernel driver.
Then the problem is visibility. Also, what is the consequence of all what also skeevy420 wrote as well, is that userbase is small. Then not much SUSE dedicated forums and when you looking for help even on general ones it is difficult to find someone who uses SUSE as you do. Those who do not work on SUSE are not in the topic. Finally less likely you will find solution. The opposite situation to Fedora/Centos/RH.
Because all of that it is more likely you to find RH based distribution 'on the town' than some SUSE. Finally the other result from this situation is that GNOME with great Wayland implementation slowly become standard pushing aside everything else together with KDE and friends.

[cynic]

I am kind of disappointed that SUSE isn't as popular as the other Linux distros...

I gave it a try a couple of times in the past.
Everything worked flawlessy but I didn't like the too many customization they applied to every piece of software (ie Gnome).

Don't know if this is still true nowadays.

Beside that, I have great respect for them.

[andreano]

So «SUSE doesn't have a "flavor" of its own»:

* KDE centric: As others have mentioned, possibly the most well integrated mainstream KDE centric distro. Your alternatives are not many: Mageia, Kubuntu and KDE Neon.
* Sysadmin's favorite: Instead of having to google how one is supposed to configure stuff in 2022, the most important settings remain in YaST.
* User friendly package manager: instead of apt-this and apt-that, zypper is capable and discoverable out of the box.
* Extensive packages and repositories: OBS stands for OpenSUSE Build Service, as we all know.
* 1-click install of said packages, searchable from software.opensuse.org
* Btrfs: I opted out, but if you fancy installers that suggest btrfs on your root filesystem by default, I guess that also counts as flavor.
* European: Also flavor.
* Green: Also flavor.

[danielnez1]

IMHO YaST is hands down the best feature of any of the SUSE distros, It is probably the closest the Linux world has to ability like Windows to fine tune the OS without having to use the command line (which does have its place though it is not for everyone, especially new users). It's a shame YaST4Debian never took off.

[kylew77]

Finally the other result from this situation is that GNOME with great Wayland implementation slowly become standard pushing aside everything else together with KDE and friends.

Gnome and wayland are taking over the world at Red Hat's command. That along with systemD. No one uses simple x11 window managers like fluxbox anymore. The famous Xmonad had a big release a few months ago and didn't even make the news at Phoronix and adopted a new logo just this week or last week. The Red Hat monoculture has led me to more research into the *BSDs, particularly FreeBSD and OpenBSD. I don't feel that FreeBSD is as secure as Linux in many ways and OpenBSD lacks such creature comforts as virtualization with gui support and wine support at all, but I feel that in the coming years OpenBSD will become my daily driver.

[Serge]

I'm sure all of the little things add up and there's plenty of little reasons mentioned in this discussion that probably all contributed some small degree to why SUSE and openSUSE aren't more popular. But really I think the big one, that's been kinda glossed over here under the dirty word "marketing", is the even more dirty word "enterprise sales". Red Hat managed to win enough contracts to establish their distro as the enterprise standard. No one cares about all the mudslinging when so many jobs either involve managing RHEL deployments or developing custom software targeted to run on RHEL deployments. Fedora derives a not insignificant amount of its popularity from the fact that many regard it as the best personal use compliment for those who manage or develop for RHEL professionally.

I'm not European so my insight isn't the greatest, but it just does not appear to me that SUSE ever managed to achieve anywhere near the same level of enterprise sales, except maybe like a decent run about a decade and a half ago that was still only a fraction of Red Hat's success.

Debian's community enthusiasm, on the other hand, benefited greatly from the fact that there was no such significant corporate involvement. Red Hat for those who wanted to go the pro route, Debian for those who wanted to spite them. SUSE never had a chance competing against Debian, and they lost the competition against Red Hat. Ubuntu's popularity comes from being "all the good stuff about Debian but doesn't require a CS degree to operate with competence". Arch Linux is irrelevant in the greater scheme (Arch user myself, btw).

So, in short, it's all Red Hat or Debian. The others derive their popularity from the success of those two. SUSE lost competing on the Red Hat route and never had a chance to even try the Debian route.

EDIT: Ugh, re-read what I wrote and realized that I'm being incredibly unfair to Debian's amazing community. It's a crazy community, which was a major reason why I stopped using that distro, but there is also a lot of positive energy there that you simply won't find with heavy duty corporate oversight. "Spite" is a very poor explanation for Debian's success.

[foxhound]

Gnome and wayland are taking over the world at Red Hat's command. That along with systemD. No one uses simple x11 window managers like fluxbox anymore. The famous Xmonad had a big release a few months ago and didn't even make the news at Phoronix and adopted a new logo just this week or last week.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...e-Mode-Quickly
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...er-Abandonware

There is more of that stuff ... and this is sad reality.

The Red Hat monoculture has led me to more research into the *BSDs, particularly FreeBSD and OpenBSD. I don't feel that FreeBSD is as secure as Linux in many ways and OpenBSD lacks such creature comforts as virtualization with gui support and wine support at all, but I feel that in the coming years OpenBSD will become my daily driver.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo

I really encourage you to watch this carefully. TL;DW: FreeBSD developer speech that clarifies many topics, mainly in the area of systemd but not only. They really wish to have systemd in FreeBSD but they are simply out of resources.
I tried OpenBSD as well but they are years behind current technologies. For instance hibernation ... the system will not hibernate if you do not have 16MB of continuous memory - hello, we have 2022! And try to tell them 'but Linux can ...' and you will be banned faster than you finish this sentence.
OpenBSD is even shorter in developer resources than FreeBSD.