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The History of S.u.S.E

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Re: The History of S.u.S.E

#71

Post by kjs3 »

I used SuSE for many years as my daily driver, and it was generally a very nice ride, and I have/would recommended it to others. I got away from it a few years back because I was always hitting something I wanted to install that was "we know about Debian and Redhat...everything else you're on your own". I think I remember the last-straw was getting a video-in card and associated OSS HDTV software running...fought for a while with SuSE and Debian 'Just Worked'. If I had more time to build-from-source this probably would have been a non-issue, but if I'm going to get a new hobby building everything from source, there are probably a couple of other distros I should look at.

I should definitely revisit it...I keep running into "the Debian + Backport version of this software is just a little too out of date for what you want to do" and Ubuntu has pissed me off in other, more annoying ways too many times.

Re: The History of S.u.S.E

#72

Post by gbil »

pjmlp wrote: post #66

After Red-Hat and Mandrake, it became my favourite home distro until Ubuntu came into the scene. Still have the SuSE 6.3 box, like it used to be common in those days. Yast is a great tool, and SusSE is one of the few distros that isn't stuck in the 1970's view of what means OS administration. Also an ideal candidate for the upcoming age of siloed countries, stuck in commercial wars.

6.3 was when I jumped to SuSE and yast was a revelation at the time. On the other hand I jumped away from SuSE later because of the many custom ways of doing things.

Re: The History of S.u.S.E

#73

Post by PeterStuer »

dmacvicar wrote: post #12

I worked there for more than a decade, and I can never highlight enough: - How great the place was for those involved in the open-source ecosystem - How great Novell and Attachmate were as owners The company had, like many others, good and tough times, but the people were very passionate about it. I will never stop feeling lucky for it being part of me for so many years.

"How great Novell and Attachmate were as owners"

Could you elaborate on that? What made them great?

Re: The History of S.u.S.E

#74

Post by toprerules »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #60
toprerules wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% of people who dislike systemd can't come up with a better solution that solves all of the problems that systemd was created to solve.

> 100% of people who dislike systemd can't come up with a better solution that solves all of the problems that systemd was created to solve. Perhaps because these people consider that solving all the problems that systemd claims to solve does introduce too many other problems, so they tend to consider it to be the better solution to solve, say, 90 % of the problems that systemd solves, but introduce less new problems…

That's every piece of technology. If this wasn't the case, we wouldn't have jobs. Resistance to change on the basis of "it will cause more problems" halts all technological progress. If you think you can do better, show. me. the. code.

Re: The History of S.u.S.E

#75

Post by usrusr »

Deeg9rie9usi wrote: post #11

Don't forget about LST: https://www-lst-de.translate.goog/de/main.php?id=02&_x_tr_sl...

Which later became Caldera Deutschland and played a bit of a role in Caldera Open Linux. And which happened to have its offices well within commuting range of everything SuSE. I've been wondering about local connections ever since I recognized the Caldera sign on that building (back in the 20th).

Re: The History of S.u.S.E

#76

Post by sgt »

nezirus wrote: post #41

SuSE was my first Linux system and it helped a lot to spark my interest. Yast (software manager) and SaX (XFree86 configuration tool) were a Godsend for a noob like me in 199x. It's still solid today, and I hold it in high regards, even if I moved to greener Linux pastures.

YaST was pretty clunky but rock solid!

Re: The History of S.u.S.E

#77

Post by psankar »

I worked there for a few years during the Novell/Attachmate management. They had a strong bias towards the kernel teams and engineers. They had an european work culture and some very good leads. Their Engineers were very good. The internal mailing lists were ripe with technical discussions. Got some amazing friends and inspirational engineers with whom I would love to work again.

However, There were infighting between the GNOME and KDE desktop teams. The VPs were mostly overpaid and practically useless. The constant churn of acquisition, looking for a new buyer, etc. did not help their long term cause.

With the older system software (kernels, compilers, etc) and infra layer getting commoditized I wonder how long they may remain relevant. When they brought in a new CEO and acquired Rancher I hoped that they may recover with K8S etc, but the CEO has quit and the acquisition has not done much it seems. Until they remove some dinosaurs from the old management at VP levels, I honestly do not see any recovery for them. Thumbs up for the Engineering (and leads) and heavy thumbs down for the Management, is how I remember my time there.

Re: The History of S.u.S.E

#78

Post by dizhn »

mdip wrote: post #7

I've been a user of openSUSE since "openSUSE", nearly. It's my daily driver, today. I want to say I was playing with Mandrake, Red Hat and a little Gentoo at the time. I started using it regularly around 2010ish - I was working at a Windows shop and had a pretty elaborate home lab with Windows servers and domain controllers so I could do things at home "before trying that on corporate." I remember the deciding factor…

No snapper, no rollbacks without btrfs I'm afraid.

Re: The History of S.u.S.E

#80

Post by dark-star »

One thing I always found awesome is that even the very first versions, like "Linux Aktuell 4.x" from 1996 or so, already had full support for Braille terminals during installation.

That made SuSE very usable for blind people, even installable, while for other operating systems you always needed someone to set the system up for you (and probably still do).

I am not blind personally (and I don't know anybody who is), but I still found that a fascinating thing to do (I assume they knew someone who was blind and required that support?)

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