SUSE targets pre-summer IPO(reuters.com)
reuters.com
SUSE targets pre-summer IPO
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN2B12AD
106 comments
I'm curious if anyone knows why SUSE is going IPO?
Perhaps because they’re owned by an investment company who now want their money back.
The timing seems right, Redhat is now owned by IBM, so setting SuSE free to compete with Ubuntu and Redhat might be a smart move. Ubuntu is doing their own thing in many respects, and IBM pretty much removed RedHat from the stockmarket, and pissed of some people with CentOS. Those CentOS users need to look for a new distro.
The timing seems right, Redhat is now owned by IBM, so setting SuSE free to compete with Ubuntu and Redhat might be a smart move. Ubuntu is doing their own thing in many respects, and IBM pretty much removed RedHat from the stockmarket, and pissed of some people with CentOS. Those CentOS users need to look for a new distro.
If someone is moving off on CentOS Linux and doesn't want to start paying for RHEL, why would they want to pay either SUSE or Canonical instead? Certainly they could move to openSUSE but that makes them SUSE users, not customers. And users who have demonstrated they're willing to go through a migration to avoid paying.
We pay SUSE and RedHat because enterprise customers demand support contracts with vendors. For everything else we just use CentOS.
Also, both SUSE and RedHat have additional features locked behind the enterprise subscription. It might be open source but requires a license.
Also, both SUSE and RedHat have additional features locked behind the enterprise subscription. It might be open source but requires a license.
This makes me wonder. What Linux does Google run? I'm guessing Debian.
I believe their Linux desktops are Debian-based but my understanding is their servers run a highly customized version of Linux that really isn't based on and doesn't look like a conventional distro.
They used to use their own Ubuntu variant for desktops, but switched to their own Debian variant.
And ChromeOS is based on Gentoo IIRC.
And ChromeOS is based on Gentoo IIRC.
[deleted]
I'm looking forward to https://rockylinux.org/
By the same author of CentOS and promises to be 100% bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise.
By the same author of CentOS and promises to be 100% bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise.
> IBM pretty much removed RedHat from the market
Could you please elaborate on this?
Could you please elaborate on this?
my guess is: Investors want to make a good exit and then try to sell it to SAP.
So if SUSE IPOs at $8.3B, that represents an 320% appreciation or ~82% IRR from the Micro Focus sale in March of 2019 at $2.535. I wonder how much additional value is trapped inside MCRO.L/MFGP while it trades at a COBOL valuation? Looking at you Vertica...
Micro Focus is an insanely weird company. It’s just a strange mix of software companies collected during the years, seamingly without any sort of overall plan.
There have been a bunch of companies like that over the years. See also CA. What tends to happen is someone has a grand vision of how this acquisition with dovetail neatly with the existing portfolio and the integration gets only part-way there, strategies or the market shifts, and you're left with yet another product that sells enough to keep plugging along but doesn't really fit with anything else.
I don’t think MicroFocus is really organized around integration..it’s more of a PE/holding company like Vista (?imo). The problem remains that they bought the entirety of HP’s software portfolio and transformed it to a declining legacy market valuation. I would not be surprised if a Vertica IPO would raise more than MicroFocus market capitalization (~$2B) and debt ($4B) combined...sort of like SUSE in this case. AWS deal should help, but in reality the mix of holdings doesn’t make sense to me and several of their properties would make more sense standing alone.
Don't forget they also hold the copyright to UNIX[1]. They're doing absolutely nothing with it, presumably other than collecting royalties from Xinuos.
[1] https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2018/11/26/why-bsd-os-is-...
[1] https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2018/11/26/why-bsd-os-is-...
The whole business of Novell retaining the copyrights to UNIX when they transferred other rights to SCO may have been the most weird twist of a generally surreal case.
I wonder if we'll ever really know the whole backstory here. SCO pretty clearly messed up big time but did their lawyers just screw up or did SCO decide this was a detail to be dealt with later?
I wonder if we'll ever really know the whole backstory here. SCO pretty clearly messed up big time but did their lawyers just screw up or did SCO decide this was a detail to be dealt with later?
Interesting read. What could you do with the copyright to UNIX?
Quite frankly I’m surprised they still exist. Is it mostly European contracts? You never really hear about SUSE anymore…
Googling around a little bit it actually seems like they have a lot of their largest customers in their US. Apparently Whole Foods, Walmart a bunch of other retailers and several American government institutions like Fema and several city administrations.
Wouldn't surprise me if the US is actually their largest market.
Wouldn't surprise me if the US is actually their largest market.
Continental Europe was by far their largest market just a couple years ago. North American expansion was always a matter of discussion (if not investment) but it has only really picked up steam in the last year or so.
Walmart is going BIG on Kubernetes (like, 100% full-throttle), so they might need to get struck from this list soon...
SUSE bought Rancher though, so they are all into Kubernetes too
How does that follow?
https://www.suse.com/solutions/kubernetes/
https://www.suse.com/solutions/kubernetes/
You hardly hear about them, doesn't mean they don't exist.
SUSE is a large distribution based in Germany, in Europe they have significant inroads in government contracts.
SUSE is a large distribution based in Germany, in Europe they have significant inroads in government contracts.
I didn’t say they didn’t exist, but clearly it’s not just me who never really think about them:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=U...
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=U...
They're a German-based company and, yes, they've always been bigger in Europe than in the US (relative to the market as a whole).
SUSE bought Rancher in 2020, and that was also in the news.
They once had one of the best KDE desktops available.
I have Very fond memories of KDE ~3 running on SuSE 8.1ish in the early 2000s. My XFCE setup today is far cleaner and more efficient, but it doesn't give me the same sense of satisfaction.
Last time I checked, a number of Cray supercomputers were using it in some capacity.
Circa 2001/2002, I had a lot of fun learning SUSE Linux where we had CDs of the OS that we could install. I remember being able to do a partition on my Windows (98/XP) and installing SuSE Linux on it. Fun times.
CDs were common in redhat (still without the E of Enterprise linux), debian, slackware and all...
But what to say about the manuals?
Those manuals and books included with the CDs, in the box.
For me they were a catalyst in my Linux learning.
Really good quality manuals, with reference tables, and covering many (many) topics. From the the graphical environment to the command line, from the administration of the local system, to network services, good structure, nice tips, cheatsheets, reference tables, even covering kernel compilation!
As you say, they did include everything needed, to live together with win98... tools, floppy images, etc... and the documentation about howto do it beforehand.
In that modem times, with low speed internet, the CDs where valuable, indeed.
But those books included in the box, for people like me in such times (self-taught beginner with Linux) those manuals were like gold!
Did use my first linux from a CD in a computers magazine.
Did play with redhat, and debian, then I did buy my first suse box with suse 6.0 (around 1999), and did buy again the box for suse 7 and 8.
Latter I did get faster internet, and did jump 100% to debian for everything. But I still have those manuals with my books.
The complete package (cds + books) is something that I remember fondly for how useful it was to me, and a lot of respect for the work of the people who made it.
But what to say about the manuals?
Those manuals and books included with the CDs, in the box.
For me they were a catalyst in my Linux learning.
Really good quality manuals, with reference tables, and covering many (many) topics. From the the graphical environment to the command line, from the administration of the local system, to network services, good structure, nice tips, cheatsheets, reference tables, even covering kernel compilation!
As you say, they did include everything needed, to live together with win98... tools, floppy images, etc... and the documentation about howto do it beforehand.
In that modem times, with low speed internet, the CDs where valuable, indeed.
But those books included in the box, for people like me in such times (self-taught beginner with Linux) those manuals were like gold!
Did use my first linux from a CD in a computers magazine.
Did play with redhat, and debian, then I did buy my first suse box with suse 6.0 (around 1999), and did buy again the box for suse 7 and 8.
Latter I did get faster internet, and did jump 100% to debian for everything. But I still have those manuals with my books.
The complete package (cds + books) is something that I remember fondly for how useful it was to me, and a lot of respect for the work of the people who made it.
Agreed. I have dozen books on Linux in my home office and of course there's the Internets...
But I've never ever found something so cohesive, comprehensive,understandable and with a great guided curve. I kept them long past obsolescence as they just couldn't be replaced by anything better :-/
But I've never ever found something so cohesive, comprehensive,understandable and with a great guided curve. I kept them long past obsolescence as they just couldn't be replaced by anything better :-/
+1 - I learned a lot from those giant manuals. I also remembered calling their (free at the time, I believe?) customer support hotline about issues with some printer and the guy dictating a bunch of kernel parameters to me over the phone (which did fix the issue!). Different times ...
Definitely better than me asking help to install some pre-1.0 KDE beta in an IRC channel somewhere in the 90's. Some helpful hacker asked me to give them the root access so they could install KDE for me. I guess that's how I learned about not trusting everybody...
Just to add another tale from the past:
Sometime in the late 90s I ordered a Red Hat CD from cheapbytes.com (CD burners weren't common yet). I didn't have a credit card yet, but I did have a checking account, so I paid for the order by mailing in a check.
Sometime in the late 90s I ordered a Red Hat CD from cheapbytes.com (CD burners weren't common yet). I didn't have a credit card yet, but I did have a checking account, so I paid for the order by mailing in a check.
"CD Burners"
Yep. They used to be premium in the 90s and even early 2000s. I remember how you were special if you had a CD burner on your computer instead of a regular CD Player :). Kinda like difference between a VCP and VCR for even older kids.
Yep. They used to be premium in the 90s and even early 2000s. I remember how you were special if you had a CD burner on your computer instead of a regular CD Player :). Kinda like difference between a VCP and VCR for even older kids.
> Fun times
Is still fun! There is Tumbleweed, a full rolling distribution (all packages with its own update cadence, and OBS fully building the dependencies that are impacted). There is also MicroOS, a transactional OS (BtrFS subvolumes for rootfs are read-only, and the update happens in the snapshot that will be activated after the reboot, providing a self-healing system when an upgrade does not affect the running environment)
Also Leap, but this is indeed boring (15.3 will be based fully in SLE binaries)
Is still fun! There is Tumbleweed, a full rolling distribution (all packages with its own update cadence, and OBS fully building the dependencies that are impacted). There is also MicroOS, a transactional OS (BtrFS subvolumes for rootfs are read-only, and the update happens in the snapshot that will be activated after the reboot, providing a self-healing system when an upgrade does not affect the running environment)
Also Leap, but this is indeed boring (15.3 will be based fully in SLE binaries)
What goes around, comes around - I am writing this comment on a laptop running Tumbleweed, with another one running Leap 15.2 sitting next to me.
Coming back to Suse was a bit like coming home. (-:
Coming back to Suse was a bit like coming home. (-:
>Coming back to Suse was a bit like coming home.
Oh that's so true, i started with 7.2 or .1, but never worked well, so i switched to mandrake, then a ~decade Debian, and now back (about 2years ago) to OpenSuse Leap (but with XFS as / and just on the laptop) everything else FreeBSD.
Oh that's so true, i started with 7.2 or .1, but never worked well, so i switched to mandrake, then a ~decade Debian, and now back (about 2years ago) to OpenSuse Leap (but with XFS as / and just on the laptop) everything else FreeBSD.
It really feels like there is a Suse renaissance happening. MicroOS is particularly interesting.
I wish them nothing but success, now that IBM has RHEL, maybe SLES will get new attention.
I wish them nothing but success, now that IBM has RHEL, maybe SLES will get new attention.
Was it SUSE that had tetris (or maybe pacman) available while the CD installer was running?
Suse has a special bootloader around Christmas:
https://siasky.net/NACTymsHp70KBDeyHDUlyO-XHW6nMidXO-4PM4aYy...
https://siasky.net/NACTymsHp70KBDeyHDUlyO-XHW6nMidXO-4PM4aYy...
I remember getting a CD of Suse with a C't magazine and that the installation process simply borked in the middle after a long while.
That was that until it worked like a charm with better driver support (and a Debian based distro) a few years later.
That was that until it worked like a charm with better driver support (and a Debian based distro) a few years later.
My first experience with Linux was also after ordering their CD package... maybe around 5 discs? I almost remember first time ever logging in through the terminal after installation. Wow
Me too, but 2000/2001 - I still have the box and the CDs. SuSE Linux 7.0 Personal Edition.
I did not anticipate how much of an impact on my life that was going to have.
TL;DR - Go Suse! (-:
I did not anticipate how much of an impact on my life that was going to have.
TL;DR - Go Suse! (-:
In a way, the pet->cattle transition "killed the Linux distro". Yes they're still important but commoditized
In a way it's a bit sad. The Linux desktop never was and we got Android instead
The king is dead, long live the king
In a way it's a bit sad. The Linux desktop never was and we got Android instead
The king is dead, long live the king
We got a usable Linux-inspired OS instead of suffering through the raw deal.
It's all the little things like bad window management (can't batch close from alt tab screen) to horrible UX (the new folder button hidden behind a hamburger menu) to idiotic naming (what do thunar and totem do?) and a good dose of not fixing the bugs that your users care about, that made Linux OS un-sellable.
It's all the little things like bad window management (can't batch close from alt tab screen) to horrible UX (the new folder button hidden behind a hamburger menu) to idiotic naming (what do thunar and totem do?) and a good dose of not fixing the bugs that your users care about, that made Linux OS un-sellable.
> The Linux desktop never was
Speak for yourself, my desktop is Linux now after more than a decade of Mac. (But I know what you mean: it never really gained huge traction.)
Speak for yourself, my desktop is Linux now after more than a decade of Mac. (But I know what you mean: it never really gained huge traction.)
With containers you now have a ton of Linux userlands running around, so you need a sane system for dealing with that. For the container runtimes and cgroup features, you still need a distro that maintains this stuff correctly. cgroups v1 to v2 is gonna be rough for some folks.
Linux desktop is pretty great for devs. Just like Linux server.
It seems like Linux desktop is more popular and close to legit than ever.
I think the gaming -> PC building pipeline is getting people educated and interested in the nitty gritty of their home computers, plus there are more people exposed to Linux now than ever just through a giant and growing industry of software devs.
I think the gaming -> PC building pipeline is getting people educated and interested in the nitty gritty of their home computers, plus there are more people exposed to Linux now than ever just through a giant and growing industry of software devs.
the linux desktop has existed and been usable for twenty years.
if you want a windows desktop, buy a windows license.
if you want linux to look like windows, well then yeah ... you're going to be disappointed.
if you want a windows desktop, buy a windows license.
if you want linux to look like windows, well then yeah ... you're going to be disappointed.
GNU_James(1)
This is great for Linux
I have never actually seen SUSE used in the wild (running services in a data center or Cloud), it's always been CentOS / RHEL, or Ubuntu.
SUSE is a great distro though and I'm happy to see this. Does anyone have any anecdata where they've seen it most heavily used?
SUSE is a great distro though and I'm happy to see this. Does anyone have any anecdata where they've seen it most heavily used?
I use it everyday! I work in a highly regulated industry and for some reason it's the only "validated" distribution that we could get approved to run internal web apps. I'm pretty sure that's false, but I'll take any Linux I can get over Windows, and its tools for system management are actually pretty great.
A relatively recent development, but OpenSUSE is shaping up to be one of the preferred distros for automotive embedded linux applications.
Aha. Perhaps they have some kind of collaboration with Porsche/Volkswagen or Opel...?
Not sure about those OEMs, but Daimler definitely is working with them. These German brands really really like to use German software
"Does anyone have any anecdata where they've seen it most heavily used?"
In germany. It's quite widespread there in companies and public institutions. I prefer SLES over red hat/centos, but that, of course, is just a matter of personal taste.
In germany. It's quite widespread there in companies and public institutions. I prefer SLES over red hat/centos, but that, of course, is just a matter of personal taste.
I hear it is used quite a lot in Europe. My experience is similar to yours, RHEL or Ubuntu, but I am based in the US.
I played a bit with Open SUSE on my home machine, I wouldn't use it a work simply because there aren't as many repos for the package mangager, for instance if you want to install kubeadm you would have to build from source.
I played a bit with Open SUSE on my home machine, I wouldn't use it a work simply because there aren't as many repos for the package mangager, for instance if you want to install kubeadm you would have to build from source.
I’ve found many yum repos that aren’t specifically opensuse repos still work. Add in the OBS repos and I have been impressed by the available software.
kubeadm is in the repo for years meanwhile.
While this may be true, I've also never needed as few third party repositories as I do with openSUSE (particularly Tumbleweed). Virtually everything I've needed is in the official repos in modern versions. (Arch + AUR is a similar story, but honestly I prefer my experience with openSUSE.)
> Does anyone have any anecdata where they've seen it most heavily used?
Continental European enterprises.
Continental European enterprises.
Yep. SAP utilizes it, for instance.
When I was there, my laptop was a ridiculously overspec'd Windows system (with a high end Nvidia Quadro for unknown reasons), and they had us run a SUSE VM with IntelliJ for our dev environment.
When I was there, my laptop was a ridiculously overspec'd Windows system (with a high end Nvidia Quadro for unknown reasons), and they had us run a SUSE VM with IntelliJ for our dev environment.
Not that I've used it in several years, but Teradata and AsterData used to run on SUSE. It was extremely stable in my experience.
Both definitely still did as of the end of October when I worked at Teradata.
I've seen in a few datacenters in Europe. At the end companies decide based on license and support more than tech.
openSUSE is my daily OS, mostly because the Packman repository is so comprehensive.
A lot of the mainframes out there are running SUSE. SUSE for S/390.
Way back, SUSE had something like 90% of the Linux marketshare on IBM mainframes. IBM's initial Linux work on the platform was done in Germany (Bohlingen I believe.) That eroded over time as Linux on the mainframe went more mainstream and Red Hat added similar mainframe support features to what SUSE had.
Bohlingen? I have never heard about such an IBM location.
Maybe you meant Böblingen. That used to be a big research and development site since the days of punched cards until its shutdown was announced 2 years ago. They did a lot of zSystem stuff, no idea whether anything with SUSE.
Disclaimer: I was a trainee at another IBM research site long before Linux was invented. So I cannot reveal any internals about the topic.
Maybe you meant Böblingen. That used to be a big research and development site since the days of punched cards until its shutdown was announced 2 years ago. They did a lot of zSystem stuff, no idea whether anything with SUSE.
Disclaimer: I was a trainee at another IBM research site long before Linux was invented. So I cannot reveal any internals about the topic.
I'm sure you're right which is why I couldn't confirm it on Google.
Example: https://newsroom.ibm.com/Bringing-Linux-to-IBM-Z This is very politically partner-agnostic but a lot of the work was specifically around SUSE in the early days.
Example: https://newsroom.ibm.com/Bringing-Linux-to-IBM-Z This is very politically partner-agnostic but a lot of the work was specifically around SUSE in the early days.
>This is very politically partner-agnostic
Not really. Redhat and SUSE get named explicitly.
Edit: Ubuntu, too.
Not really. Redhat and SUSE get named explicitly.
Edit: Ubuntu, too.
I still see many banks using it. I think in the future they will end up using Redhat, but until now, I still didn't see it happening.
YaST (Yet another Setup Tool) is amazing. It allows you to configure your system using a GUI, just like on Windows. It is an important on-ramp to Linux.
Back in the day, they also had SaX (SuSE advanced X-configurator or something like that), a GUI tool to configure XFree86. That was something I sorely missed when I started using other Linux distros and *BSD - editing the config file by hand was so painful there's an xkcd about it: https://xkcd.com/963/
I thought SAP bought them a while ago. Looks like I’m wrong. No idea where I got that from :(
Both German and SAP utilizes them a fair amount.
Somewhere around 2001 I bought Suse 7.X. It came in a fold out with each fold carrying a CD. 6 folds for 6 CDs but the 7th fold was the DVD and it had all the 6 CDs of data plus more. That just about blew my teenage mind.
Also echoing some comments here. Suse was and remains one of my favorite distros to this day and was instrumental in my learning nix. Spent alot of time building opensuse distros back in the day with their build service. Just a little disappointed the IPO will not be in US Markets otherwise I'd buy
They’ve joined RedHat in pouring a big bucket of sleazy business behavior onto the open source movement.