The US market is primarily RHEL. Historically the EU market and SAP shops were SLES. I admit I’m far enough removed today that I’m not sure if that still holds true.

Enterprises don't care what distro they use, and SuSE knows that. Enterprises care about the reputation of their professional services provider.

RHEL is increasingly seen as threatening its own place in the market, and enterprises want to be sure their multi million dollar investments will be stable over the long term. Paying SuSE for support makes sense if you believe they will support you better over the long term than RHEL will. Time will tell who provides more value, but SuSE does appear to be out-IBMing IBM.

From what I've seen big enterprises have thousands of RHEL or SLES licenses and the whole thing is managed by one guy who can hardly migrate from RHEL 7 to RHEL 8 because of the huge backlog of work he has.

For the average enterprise switching from SLES to SUSE RHEL means that update will happen in 5-7 years

Had to laugh at that, as I still have a good deal of RHEL/CentOS 7 and I'm the "one guy" managing these systems.

I've been migrating to Ubuntu or retiring systems for the last two years and still not done. Hoping to be rid of RHEL 7 before updates stop.

I've done a few of those RHEL/CentOS/Ubuntu moves myself, and even though it was a pain I'm still somewhat impressed over how painless the actual move was when I had good documentation and also still terrified of what it feels like to try to transition undocumented boxes.

I dislike windows and the M$ ecosystem but as far as server management for undocumented servers it's much easier to deal with them than for Linux stuff. For an undocumented Windows server, you send out an email, wait 2 weeks, shut it down and listen for the screams.

For an undocumented Linux server, you send out an email, wait 2 weeks, prep the fire extinguishers, batten the hatches, and wait for the mob of angry villagers to storm the DC with pitchforks because thanks to you their print server for their paper checks is now printing in Klingon and it can't be fixed without resurrecting the guy that wrote the software 6 days before he died of terminal terminal disease.

so what you're saying is nothing business critical runs on Windows?

No. Just that Windows servers are much easier to navigate to find what files and systems are running.

With Linux systems, sure, you can check chron and top and find what is running and where it is but it's a bit more unwieldy than the windows GUI, plus you don't always have a full list of the file and folder permissions and getting a full list of those requirements for whichever softwares are accessing them.

Oh, I see, that makes sense.

You struck a nerve on this one ;)

No biggie, they could always outsource it to IBM and they'll do it in 4 years.

My feeling is that most engineers outside of Germany prefer RHEL to SLES.

So as a daily desktop user, how different are they in a professional environment?

Depends on what you mean. Advanced GUI is much better on SUSE though https://yast.opensuse.org/

My feeling is most engineers prefer Debian. It's managers that tend to prefer corporate solutions.

As an engineer I don't care. In my career I have worked on SunOS, SLES, Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, CentOS, Alpine and probably more.

I prefer something that is kept reasonably up to date so that I don't have to fight ancient long-fixed issues or missing features. But I really don't care, if it pays the bills I'll use it.

Going back about 15 years with this, but I used to prefer Debian / Ubuntu as a user, but for automating pxe installations and setting up package repos, Redhat/Centos were miles better.

I remember that way back when, Deutschebank standardised on SuSE because they were a major shareholder in the company. DB had an IT department bigger than most entire companies, so I'm sure that had a pretty big effect on the ecosystem.

Interesting - Deutsche Bank is one of the flagship OpenShift customers.

That tracks with my experience. I played with OpenSuSE but only ever found SLES when dealing with SAP.

RHEL, either officially paid for, or via CentOS / Oracle Linux, is everywhere though, gub'mnt, private, academia.

I think they are positioning their own professionally supported enterprise distro as “the best” while positioning this Red Hat clone as the free-est ( both in the free beer and freedom sense ).

It is a good move. They siphon off customers from the competition to a free option and dramatically raise awareness of their paid service.

If it turns out that they still cannot make headway in North America with SLES, they can create paid support options for Liberty. Just like Red Hat, they will have the credibility of being the distro maintainer.

Given the staffing and infrastructure they already have to maintain for SLES, maintaining a RHEL-a-like may not even be that much work.

Really smart.