Wow that brings back memories!
The History of S.u.S.E
111–120 of 132 posts
Re: The History of S.u.S.E
#112After 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.
> After Red-Hat and Mandrake, it became my favourite home distro until Ubuntu came into the scene. I fucking loved Mandrake. And Red Hat on a PowerMac. It was a challenge but it was very rewarding when it worked. I had the opposite trajectory after that, though. I tried Ubuntu when it was new and shiny but ran into so many issues… Now I have been using OpenSuse continuously for about 6 years without complaint. Even t…
My whole story was that other than a netbook running Ubuntu, now dead, all my Linux stuff at home, are custom stuff on the router and BlueRay player that at least run Linux kernel itself, Android and WebOS powered devices, and running containers on WSL/macOS.
Mandrake was great, by its usability and being compiled for Pentiums instead of 386 CPUs.
The move to SuSE was when their development quality started to go down, and eventually pivoted into some other distro.
Re: The History of S.u.S.E
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use it at (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, at work); I never particularly liked or disliked it; but once they adopted systemd - I lost respect for it.
Sorry for your loss. I personally find that systemd solves real problems and makes Linux better. It has worts, but so does everything.
Switching to Windows could also "solve lots of problems". It introduces many problems though and is an undesirable thing to do, especially in terms of the ecosystem of free software.
About "making Linux better" - that's false on principle, on architectural grounds, and is not a matter of finding.
Re: The History of S.u.S.E
#114SuSE doesn’t get enough credit for the quality of the distribution. Transactional updates, serious work towards a reproducible distribution, nano as an excellent container runtime, stability under large workloads - it’s a nice piece of engineering.
Hey, do you like reproducible builds? I'm doing some more patches this year...
especially the core packages are getting in good shape now. The others have 1-2% packages with issues left.
Re: The History of S.u.S.E
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I want to say I was playing with Mandrake, Red Hat and a little Gentoo at the time. I don't know when you started playing with all of these and for how long, so it can be absolutely how you said (in the end, it's your own life!) but chances are you mostly used Mandriva, since the Mandrake name disappeared in 2005.
I can’t all for the parent obviously, but my experience is similar and I was using Red Hat and Mandrake around 1999.
I was doing the same around that time :) but if we are talking second half of '00s as the GP was implying, then it's Mandriva.
Re: The History of S.u.S.E
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use it at (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, at work); I never particularly liked or disliked it; but once they adopted systemd - I lost respect for it.
Everyone craps on systemd, but I have never really had an issue with it. It does the job I want it to, I think a lot of the complaints are overblown. Either way, doesn't every major Linux distro other than Gentoo use systemd now?
Actually, no, not all major distributions have caved and adopted systemd: Other than Gentoo, there is also SlackWare.
(There is also Devuan, which is "Debian without systemd", i.e. minimal changes to allow for systemd not to be used, but of course that doesn't change the default for everything depending directly on Debian.)
There are all sorts of complaints against systemd, some may or may not be overblown - I certainly have not investigated many use cases - but the problem is with the core of it: A single software project gradually taking over more and more of the OS userland. That is simply not a good thing to stick on your system.
No less importantly, I don't believe systemd solves any significant problems vis-a-vis its alternatives.
Re: The History of S.u.S.E
#117And then there was /usr/bin/zast as a symlink pointing to /usr/bin/yast - just in case you had a DIN keyboard, but the matching keymap hadn’t been loaded.
We still ship a symlink `/usr/bin/yzpper` => `/usr/bin/zypper` by default. ;-)
Re: The History of S.u.S.E
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry for your loss. I personally find that systemd solves real problems and makes Linux better. It has worts, but so does everything.
Switching to Windows could also "solve lots of problems". It introduces many problems though and is an undesirable thing to do, especially in terms of the ecosystem of free software. About "making Linux better" - that's false on principle, on architectural grounds, and is not a matter of finding.
I personally found no issues with systemd in principal, the architectural issues are largely transient and are mostly fixed, and I can name multiple examples where it has in fact made things better:
- Timer units prevent long job duplication and have mechanisms for restarting as soon as possible if an execution is missed. Cron can't do that on its own, and scripting such functionality is brittle. - Service units are much simpler and easier to understand than shell script init, restart handing is very good to have built in, and dependency management is extraordinarily useful. User units are also great. - Automatic capturing of logs with journald and its built-in disk usage limitations are better in practice than piping to files/syslog and running logrotate on blind schedules. - cgroup resource controls for processes are far more effective than nice/ionice, etc, and can be altered on the fly for every unit without restarting. - systemd-resolved is one of the few ways to get system-wide support for dns-over-tls, dnssec, and per-service/network choice of DNS servers without considerable effort.
These are just the features that I personally see and interact with almost daily, but I have seen and used enough to know that its dbus and udev integrations are stellar and enable useful functionality for desktops and networking.
I understand that some people have decided that religious adherence to a vague unix dogma is more important than features, usability, and reliability, but please accept that some of us have work to do, which includes the maintainers of major Linux distributions.
Re: The History of S.u.S.E
#119I 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
This is the opposite how I and not only I remember it. Novell did save S.u.S.E. in 2005 by the highly controversial deal. And then started to slowly dissolve its internal identity within the whole company and almost succeeded. The Novell management was incompetent, trying to save it's dying business by bending what SUSE was doing. Barely survived the 2008+ crisis.
Attachmate, another legacy product company was interested in Novell due to assets and customers. That there was a business unit (SUSE) that was quite capable was merely a surprise to the new owners. They let us live and do our jobs. Which paid off because Novell died in a year or so after attempts to salvage it. The Attachmate management wanted to make money, no interest in SUSE. You can call it good management, but mainly due to the fact that the accounting was internally split from Novell and the numbers did not lie.
The secret sauce of SUSE is that it has strong foundation and longtimers that still somehow manage to keep the spirit and attract new poeople who appreciate it in the work environment. The miracle of SUSE it's been able to survive any shitty and clueless top management it had had installed by any of the buyers. So far. Fingers crossed.
Re: The History of S.u.S.E
#120SUSE is not very popular in southeast-east asia I suppose. for corp here (at least in my country), the defacto OS for enterprise is RedHat. Never once I heard SUSE was considered.