What does ‘enterprise Linux’ actually mean? Not asking snarkily; I’m curious what the main differences are between this and other Linux distros. Is it mostly about getting good tech support?
SLAs, support, LTS services etc...
EQT eyes potential $6B sale of Linux pioneer SUSE, sources say
21–30 of 38 posts
Re: EQT eyes potential $6B sale of Linux pioneer SUSE, sources say
#22This whole thing of private equity + companies getting massively inflated - only ends one way, it might not be this this buyer but one down the line, but there is something deeply wrong with the whole model, the one that starts with startups such as those funded by ycombinator.
Nobody uses SuseLinux any more. If SUSE gets 6 billion dollars and a private equity firm gets nothing valuable, there's nothing wrong with that.
I've been using OpenSUSE on my home PC for the past 3 years - it is a really solid Linux distribution and I rarely had any problems.
Re: EQT eyes potential $6B sale of Linux pioneer SUSE, sources say
#23What does ‘enterprise Linux’ actually mean? Not asking snarkily; I’m curious what the main differences are between this and other Linux distros. Is it mostly about getting good tech support?
Yeah it's about support contracts, which covers a lot of services actually such as maintaining security audited package repositories. But most importantly it's about support life cycles you can rely on for a long term investment of time and infrastructure outlays. For example, RHEL 10 has a planned support phase out until 2035, with extended support available until 2038. They do tend to have a different goal for thei…
> For example, RHEL 10 has a planned support phase out until 2035, with extended support available until 2038.
I wonder if that's 19 Jan 2038. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
Re: EQT eyes potential $6B sale of Linux pioneer SUSE, sources say
#24What does ‘enterprise Linux’ actually mean? Not asking snarkily; I’m curious what the main differences are between this and other Linux distros. Is it mostly about getting good tech support?
If you have more than a 100 linux machines you certainly need someone who knows linux to support them. You can either hire a team to do this or hire someone who will manage a support contract with suse/ubuntu/red hat etc.
Re: EQT eyes potential $6B sale of Linux pioneer SUSE, sources say
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody uses SuseLinux any more. If SUSE gets 6 billion dollars and a private equity firm gets nothing valuable, there's nothing wrong with that.
It's still quite popular with SAP shops here in Europe at least. And I could imagine that the strong anti-American sentiment in Europe plays in its favor.
Yep. The majority of the worlds SAP-installations use SUSE somewhere in the stack. As for the desktop, opensuse is rock solid. I've used it for years without any problems. I've had colleagues who use Ubuntu and they always have glitches and hiccups.
Re: EQT eyes potential $6B sale of Linux pioneer SUSE, sources say
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah it's about support contracts, which covers a lot of services actually such as maintaining security audited package repositories. But most importantly it's about support life cycles you can rely on for a long term investment of time and infrastructure outlays. For example, RHEL 10 has a planned support phase out until 2035, with extended support available until 2038. They do tend to have a different goal for thei…
> For example, RHEL 10 has a planned support phase out until 2035, with extended support available until 2038. I wonder if that's 19 Jan 2038. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
RHEL 10 lacks 32-bit x86 packages, so it goes past that date. RHEL 9 support ends before that date.
Re: EQT eyes potential $6B sale of Linux pioneer SUSE, sources say
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
By "nobody" I presume you mean you and your friends? From the article; >> "More than 60% of the Fortune 500 rely on SUSE to power some of their workloads, according to the company." This is an Enterprise version of Linux, and unless you are in the enterprise space you're unlikely to come across it. Also from the article; >> "The company generates about $800 million in revenue " So again, this suggests that people are…
Over 60% are SUSE?! Sorry, but I’m with everyone else… I remember since the start that SUSE was more popular in Europe, but no way would that be the case in the US. If anything, I’d be willing to put my money on > 60% of Linux installs being RHEL/Centos rather than SUSE
Why would they lie? Hacker News simply has this bizarre blind spot about what Fortune 500 companies do and what computers are that run Linux. One of their biggest customers is Chick-fil-a using k3s for the their point-of-sale network. I'm sure there are approximately zero employees interacting with the system that realize that, but it's still there.
Also, from my own experience, SUSE used to have nearly all of the US geointelligence processing because of the HPC connection mentioned elsewhere with CrayOS, but that went away when DNI forced everyone onto the CIA's private AWS service, which only had RHEL AMIs available. The national labs and more niche intelligence processing that can't run in the kinds of machines AWS provides still make heavy use of it.
Re: EQT eyes potential $6B sale of Linux pioneer SUSE, sources say
#28What does ‘enterprise Linux’ actually mean? Not asking snarkily; I’m curious what the main differences are between this and other Linux distros. Is it mostly about getting good tech support?
Support, especially for older releases (which is important for heavily regulated companies that can't upgrade on a dime).
More heavily vetted (i.e. older) kernel and support for every package in their repository.
Guaranteed security hotfixes with some time guarantees.
Training and certification programs.
Re: EQT eyes potential $6B sale of Linux pioneer SUSE, sources say
#29This whole thing of private equity + companies getting massively inflated - only ends one way, it might not be this this buyer but one down the line, but there is something deeply wrong with the whole model, the one that starts with startups such as those funded by ycombinator.
Nobody uses SuseLinux any more. If SUSE gets 6 billion dollars and a private equity firm gets nothing valuable, there's nothing wrong with that.
They own Rancher and Harvester. My brother, this is a good enough reason for someone to pick it up. There’s no better way to kill any serious sovereign cloud attempt than that.
Re: EQT eyes potential $6B sale of Linux pioneer SUSE, sources say
#30If they are sold, which I think it would be a good thing, I hope a competent organization. But these days, it will probably be another Private Equity Company that will force it to go all in on AI, eventually ruining SUSE :(