> Both SUSE’s Management and Supervisory Boards have expressed support for the strategic opportunity presented by this delisting. They believe that it will enable SUSE to concentrate on its operational priorities and the execution of its long-term strategy without the pressure of public markets.
Lets hope their incentives more strongly align with their customers, now. I am a huge SUSE fan, been using their products for 15 years. What they've been doing the last 5 or so has been almost unparalleled in the Linux space.
I used to run SUSE about 20 years ago and have always thought it was cool but haven't kept up with it much since then. What are some of the things they do that make them unparalleled?
Open Build System and OpenQA, for automated building and testing of packages. This is what gets updates to their rolling release Tumbleweed faster than Arch, but with no instability ever. I can't emphasize enough how rock solid Tumbleweed is. OBS also doubles as their own AUR equivalent - you can make your own repo and do your own builds and install from the command line, or browse and install what other people have done.
Leap is their stable distro, and shares binaries with SLES, their enterprise offering.
Both Leap and Tumbleweed have BTRFS by default, with Snapper for automated snapshots at upgrade and boot. Update messed something up? System won't boot? Just run an old snapshot until it's fixed. Zypper, the package manager, has state-of-the-art dependancy resolution, personally the best I've used.
They have a number of extremely interesting spinoff projects: MicroOS and MicroOS desktop (recently renamed, but the new names are escaping me) which use immutable root filesystems with automated updates and native Podman support. Snapper integration shines there, as well. If it fails to boot after update, it'll automatically roll back.
They're doing quite a bit, and it's all culminating in being very useable. Tumbleweed is the crown jewel, though.
I have been using Tumbleweed for a few years now, but while it seems like a stable rolling release distribution, I am not quite sure about the "rolling release" part. Each month, a new snapshot comes out, which upgrades every single package you have installed, regardless of whether there were actual upstream updates. With a full Texlive installation and just a few more suites this amount to roughly 10,000 packages and over 5GB that need to be downloaded and installed each month. This a) kind of defeats the rolling-release aspect for me, b) takes a few hours, and c) feels like a cheat for the sake of stability.
Between those snapshots you might have bleeding edge updates for all the packages, but even then I do encounter package conflicts way too often. Well, on the upside, at least they are detected.
So yes, it is stable, but it comes at a price.
Apart from that, the community support felt mediocre, at least a few years ago. The most visited platform was a bulletin board forum with very little interaction. When I had trouble installing KDE, it took a few days until someone suggested the correct diagnostic tools. This is bad for being the testbed of a commercial distribution. In the end, I just installed Arch, which packaged KDE better than Tumbleweed did.
But on the other hand, maybe only if you use a distro long enough, you get to see the downsides, and each one has them.
There are new snapshots at least once a week. While there are large updates every once in a while, those are usually due to gcc or glibc upgrades which require a rebuild of most packages -- which doesn't happen every month. If you actually have upgrades of every single package every month, you should open a bug report to figure out what is going on -- that is absolutely not normal. On my machine I usually see 10-30 packages per update, with some updates hitting ~100 packages -- anything more than that is quite rare. Large rebuilds should be uncommon, though some packages might do them more than others.
There are quite a few things I've grown to dislike about Tumbleweed after using it for the past 7-8 years, but the upgrade experience is not one of them.
Great, thanx for telling. I'll stick to Leap. Update fatigue. We're using it on servers and I'm looking for something to replace Ubuntu on the desktop. I've grown tired of the usual Ubuntu antics like snaps, ads in apt update and the convoluted /etc config hierarchy inherited from Deban. SuSE is structured way more logically and makes more sense even if it's a rpm distribution. I don't want to use a rolling distro at work to break things just when I have to deliver stuff or fix time pressing issues. I've tried Debian 12 when it came out but Firefox was unusable, some very annoying focus issues on forms.
I'd like to know if the Gnome 4 in Leap was usable. If I do a search on software.opensuse.org on gnome-desktop it only turns out packages from tumbleweed and experimental packages from SLE-15-SP2 which looks quite ancient.
You can always run Debian testing on desktop. I'm running the same installation more than a decade now. It's not "bleeding edge", but recent enough. Things slow down during freezes a bit, but it's a rolling distro at the end of the day.
>Each month, a new snapshot comes out, which upgrades every single package you have installed, regardless of whether there were actual upstream updates.
A) Snapshots come out far more regularly then once a month. Going from the mailing list we've actually had a snapshot released every day since the 4th. I'd say the average is one every three days but that's just from the top of my head.
B) they do not cover every package you have installed: They don't even know what packages you have installed, snapshots are cut on the repo side. It's true that packages get rebuilt a lot but that's because either the package updated or a dependency of the package updated that caused the package to be rebuilt.
That's called a trade-off, a very fundamental concept in pretty much everything in life.
And no, snapshots don't come out every month. They come out ~5 times every week. The most number of packages I've had to update was maybe around ~3500 and that's after 6 month of not upgrading my system.
I agree for "true" rolling distro enthusiasts, Arch is still the top choice, but Tumbleweed is great for those seeking to use a rolling distro without sinking too much time into configuration.
Uh, I've been using Tumbleweed on two machines for about seven years now, and I've experienced multiple cases of MATE just not working after an upgrade. It's not that big a deal, though, as you point out, because of snapper.
That said, I'm still using Tumbleweed on both machines, and I'm very happy with it. Even the nVidia situation is acceptable now that they offer a repo with the official drivers.
+1 for zypper. The GUI feels very "enterprise-y" but in a good way. You just pick the software you want and it gets the job done quickly and with a minimum of fuss.
Zypper has the best UX of the CLI package management tools i've tried, at least as far as updates and installation come. My favorite part, which is minor and yet makes finding packages you might want to keep an eye on when updating, is how it highlights with a color the first letter of any package to be installed/updated/etc. It was a "why don't other package managers do this?" moment the first time i saw it.
(ok perhaps other package managers do it nowadays, but i installed openSUSE 2-3 years ago and i haven't really tried every package manager out there - mainly apt/apt-get and pacman as it comes with msys2)
This isn't borne out by the numbers, for the average package. Not for openSUSE or for Fedora. The only full Linux distros I currently see with a higher percentage of up-to-date packages than Arch are KaOS, CRUX, Slackware and NixOS: https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/pnewest
Of course, whether or not the most important packages to you hit each distro first could be a totally different story.
Overall, openSUSE Tumbleweed is very up-to-date, though: ~76% by this measure— right up there with Fedora Rawhide and Gentoo.
Having used (and still using) Arch for over a decade, I can tell it is probably a good thing. Maintainers seem to know which packages bring trouble after updates and they do seem to test those more thoroughly.
I have not experienced major breaking changes for desktop or other important piece of software in many years now.
For example, things like Gnome always come to Arch months after it has been released upstream. But it makes sense because Gnome team always break existing extensions and community can't really keep up so it takes a while until popular extensions gain support. And sadly Gnome without extensions is more or less useless. Maybe Fedora gets latest Gnome on day one, but it is unusable without community extensions on day one.
I moved from Ubuntu to Tumbleweed a year ago and slowly warmed up to it.
Two days ago some update made it fail to start sddm (the display manager, aka graphical login screen) correctly. Some error regarding missing libraries. Network is also not working anymore.
After trying to repair it for a while I am about to ditch it and go with KDE Neon or Mint (their Debian edition sounds interesting).
I will look into this Snapper thing you mentioned, maybe that helps. Otherwise my trust in that distro is unfortunately gone.
All these are nice features but until I see suse wiki pages in google search results along side the ones I see from arch, it's just easier to stay on arch.
> Open Build System and OpenQA, for automated building and testing of packages. This is what gets updates to their rolling release Tumbleweed faster than Arch, but with no instability ever.
Arch also has "no instability ever". And I don't think I've ever run into a problem where I've said, "damn, I wish the latest version was out right now", other than needing to run mainline on new machines for a few months that is.
But please don't take this comment the wrong way, I'm curious and will probably spin up a VM or two to take a look around.
Lolwat. I've tried it in earnest several times over the years on basic thinkpads (once on my only development machine, in which my only customizations were basically installing intellij ides and docker) and I would never ever, call it stable. I mean, if someone were to ask me for a picture of instability for a dictionary and they asked me to choose between Arch Linux and Windows Me logos... I'm not sure which I would choose.
To be fair though, I haven't tried it in 3 years since it last bit me. On the other hand I've had fedora running on one machine for like 7 years straight.
ooo, that auto rollback sounds really cool-- got any idea how that's done? I assume it's handled by checking for eg. a dirty-fs-flag just before the initfs boots the real system, but what if there's breakage in userspace (eg. the login manager) or in the initramfs itself?
I have to say, openSUSE introduced me to btrfs and while it isn't something i use often, when i do need the snapshot functionality it provides it is such a great feature.
The automatic snapshots saved me quite a lot to time on 2 occasions, where borked updates of the nVidia drivers resulted in problems booting the computer. On one hand, this should never happen. On the other, as long as nVidia does not improve, and nothing is going to force them, it is great to have such a safety net. It gets out of the way 99% of the time, but it is there when you need it, it’s great.
By a bizzare coincidence, I just had a breaking update today. CUPS was missing some symbols and wouldn't start. Rolled back to an earlier snapshot and all is well.
To add to the SP, the initramfs is kept on the same filesystem as everything else by default, not on a separate partition, so the initramfs is loaded from the snapshot too. However if GRUB breaks then you won't be able to boot.
Rock-solid distros with packages that keep with the times and that are as user-friendly as it gets for Linux installs. Both Tumbleweed and Leap are great.
We have far fewer issues in my lab since we replace CentOS with Leap (our experiments with Ubuntu were dreadful and we cannot babysit the computers so anything with complex maintenance is right out).
Going all rolling release was a step too far, too much of a culture shock, but we might switch to Tumbleweed in a couple of years if the stability remains as it is now.
So I just installed it yesterday on my new home PC. Switching from Windows after I sold my old PC. (I do like gaming sometimes).
Installation worked flawlessly. Hardware was detected on the spot.
I could install NVidia's official driver through YaST. Installing Steam from the package manager.
Now I am sitting with a switch pro controller and playing Hogwarts Legacy.
All around a solid experience. Their biggest competitor in this space might be Ubuntu. For me Suse has a more solid feeling to it. Also supports KDE better.
I choose Tumbleweed. Reason being that I do gaming and often you need the latest package of something to be able to. Although, I do not have any experience with Leap so maybe it is good as well?
I do back up my own files, so there is not much danger in it for me.
For a very stable distro experience at work, I use debian (stable). But it lags a few years behind, so is no good for games.
I ran SUSE around the same time (2001-2002ish), because it was the only major distro (between RH and Mandrake, primarily) that would install on my archaic 128MB PII. Debian worked but my grade school brain had no capacity for setting up Xfree86 manually. I stuck to SUSE for about 1.5 years before switching to Mandrake (and, eventually, Fedora Core) on my new Athlon XP desktop.
My nostalgia for them will probably always be strong.
Sounds like we pretty much had the same Linux story!
I started with SuSE 7 (purchased it!), then Mandrake, then Fedora, then Ubuntu, then Arch and now reluctantly back on Xubuntu because I can't get my laptop to sleep properly on Arch...
Do you remember why you switched from SuSE? I only have vague memories but I feel like the package manager might have been a bit clunky?
Maybe I should give openSUSE another go, I really dislike Ubuntu's 'ads' and snap.
Well, mainly I was young and still exploring a fresh and vibrant scene (much unlike the relatively mature Linux of today), so that was half of it.
The other half was that whenever I searched for an RPM for something I needed, it was almost always a Mandrake or RH package. RH was a pain with things like MP3s and proprietary drivers, so Mandrake seemed obvious. And yeah, SaX/YaST was a little clunkier than Drak.
I went to Fedora Core in their first version because the third party repositories became seamless enough and they were easily the best supported, especially for on-the-edge software.
Went through some Arch, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Pop_OS! etc days in-between there but have mostly settled on Fedora KDE, these days.
A lot of the sibling comments are talking about this distro itself but they are also neglecting SUSE foray into the container orchestration space with Rancher and K3s. I would assume that is where they are looking to grow.
Well this was pretty expected as it's how EQT normally operates - they purchase objects - develop them for x-years (normally about 5-ish) before re-selling or re-listing.
They've been in SuSE since 2018 - so the IPO was their try at exiting, but since it didn't work out, they're probably going a different route (couple of more years of development, then selling to someone else).
Melissa Di Donato, the SuSe ex-CEO is wife of Darren Roos, CEO of IFS (huge Enterprise Software company) - who are also owned by EQT.
EQT tends to invest heavily in their development objects, so it's probably a good thing - but they are also very adamant on timely progress, so good luck to all SuSe oldtimers who are still with the company - it's going to be another roller coaster.
Don't know that I've ever been optimistic about a company being purchased by private equity.
Anyone have counterexamples where that turned out well for customers?
The justification sounds good, but they'd say something like that even if the plan was "squeeze money out of the company at the expense of users and customers and reputation."
It's the same PE firm which owned SUSE before, orchestrated the IPO, and now, still a majority shareholder, buys the minority shares back.
If you bought in at any time between the IPO and May of this year, you'd be in for losses, so it's certainly not been an unprofitable move for them. But it's not the classical "foreign vulture PE comes in and destroys everything" situation here that people seem to be afraid of.
Many could argue that Dell improved substantially after its 2013 transition to private ownership. At least, from the consumer perspective, things improved drastically. Linux support, a wider variety of competitive lines with much needed improvements to legacy lines, adoption of AMD for CPUs/GPUs, etc.
I can't speak of their server/enterprise business, however.
I think Dell went downhill after the acquisition, their hardware quality is junk all across their line: servers, workstations, laptops, monitors, etc. Every device from them that I had my hands on recently have, at best, terrible build quality, and at worst, multiple failures. And their support is a bad joke.
That's the complete opposite of my experience. I bought an XPS 15 (it supported Linux well) and broke the screen (my own fault) about 8mos into owning it. Spoke to support and they sent a technician over two days later. They replaced the screen, tested it and were on there way 40mins later, all for free.
I've had to replace the BIOS twice in the 3 years I've owned my Dell XPS 15 (2018 model). Both cases were spontaneous failures that completely disrupted my workloads and customer support told me it's something that "just happens". Service technicians came quickly but I'd rather not need them to come in the first place.
First year warranty is usually included in the product, so of course the replacement was free. I'd suggest renewing the warranties until EoL of your laptop as these service trips will likely become a bi-annual fixture.
My experience was limited to laptops and monitors, but hardware's been good and service has been excellent.
Honestly, it reminded me more of early-Amazon customer support, than anything more recent. E.g. support agent following up with a personalized email to me to make sure everything worked out okay with a warranty claim. Talking to humans was novel and pleasant.
It’s all about the tier of support. At work we bought 20k laptops and screwed up the support spec. So we ended up with some garbage tier support that wouldn’t fix issues caused by Dell docks. You have to have “ProSupport”
We also have a region where they have a 2 hour support SLA with part in hand. They will literally put your computer down to fix ours to avoid whatever punishment that gets meted out.
ProSupport is amazing, especially on Dell hardware on eBay which still has extended coverage remaining that can be transferred. Immediate phone connection to knowledgeable and helpful technicians.
I dunno, looking at dell.com now all I see are bad CGI mockups of products and "AI" boldly slapped everywhere. It looks like trash and nothing like the Dell I used to use and own 20 years ago. I almost think the company is entirely fake and produces nothing based on their site today.
The basic problem that gives private Equity firms a bad reputation is that winding down an fading company that have fundamentally stopped growing over a 3-5 year lifespan, is a pretty good way of getting a good return on investments so it happens a lot to downward sloping companies with enough of an nostalgia inducing brand to be newsworthy.
It’s not the only ways PE companies make money sometimes they do actually allow companies to thrive on the long term by letting them escape the short term thinking that some stock traders demand but those tend to fly under the radar as well it’s not as newsworthy as some beloved brand turning to dust over a 5 year time span.
EQT the company in question here bought SuSE from Novell for a song listed it on the stock market in 2021 for a pretty decent profit and is now buying back stock at about half what they sold it for in 2021, so is itself kind of an counterexample to the narrative that PE firms always destroy what they buy.
> When Warren Buffet bought Berkshire Hathaway in 1962, he rapidly turned it from a failing textile company into a monster.
It's not like he improved their textile business. He took the name as a shell for his investment activities.
> Not private equity exactly, but he personally bought up 51% of the shares.
That's the opposite of the "without the pressure of public markets" situation though. He was doing quarterly reporting and answerable to shareholders (in some ways more answerable than a CEO who doesn't own the majority of shares - there are specific protections for minority shareholders).
Buffet bought Berkshire Hathaway entirely out of spite and has said that it was the worst investment he's ever made. The textile company continued to do poorly under his ownership, and shut down nearly 40 years ago.
I am ambivalent and withholding judgement. Hopefully this is a process to protect SUSE from greedy VCs who want to capitalize any value they can get their hands on, but it could also be a long-con process to punish SUSE for daring to fork Red Hat at their organizational level.
I've been hearing a lot about private equity lately (particularly from folks who used to pursue VC money in the past). Can you expand a bit on the negatives of PE?
Not op, but as i understand it: they swoop in, load up the company with debt, fire lots of people, then go "oh, fiddlesticks.. whelp, what can ya do??" and throw up their hands as the company inevitably crumbles.
Citation: Read up on how Toys'R'Us was put through that wringer.
Edit: actually, here's a good write-up:
"Less attention was paid to the albatross that Bain, KKR, and Vornado had placed around the company’s neck. Toys “R” Us had a debt load of $1.86 billion before it was bought out. Immediately after the deal, it shouldered more than $5 billion in debt. And though sales had slumped before the deal, they held relatively steady after it, even when the Great Recession hit. The company generated $11.2 billion in sales in the 12 months before the deal; in the 12 months before November 2017, it generated $11.1 billion."
That article discusses PE rebuilding Dollar General successfully. A lot of it depends in what condition the companies are in when they get bought. It isn't all corporate raiders.
My recollection of Toys 'R' Us was actually that the owners deliberately tanked it. They may have originally wanted to save the company, but they spent years deliberately buying and selling pieces so that Toys 'R' Us would hold all the debt while the profitable pieces went elsewhere. That wasn't an accident.
"Private equity can stack the deck in other ways, too. Firms can direct businesses they own to buy other companies and then act as broker on the deals, reaping transaction fees. After its buyout, Toys “R” Us acquired a number of companies, including FAO Schwarz, eToys.com, and assets from KB Toys (itself a failed reclamation project of Bain’s). Consolidating brick-and-mortar and online toy businesses may have been a good-faith strategy. What’s certain is that the deals helped generate $128 million in transaction fees for the owners."
What the article misses is that FAO and KB were sold off before the bankruptcy, with Toys R Us keeping all the bad parts, specifically their debt.
> Both SUSE’s Management and Supervisory Boards have expressed support for the strategic opportunity presented by this delisting. They believe that it will enable SUSE to concentrate on its operational priorities and the execution of its long-term strategy without the pressure of public markets.
Lets hope their incentives more strongly align with their customers, now. I am a huge SUSE fan, been using their products for 15 years. What they've been doing the last 5 or so has been almost unparalleled in the Linux space.