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.
My nostalgia for them will probably always be strong.
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.
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.
versus "I used to run SUSE, the organization that handles building/supporting the SUSE Linux distro, ..."
At the very least he should run them in the Iditarod.
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 got burned by debian btrfs upgrades, so I'll stay with ext4 though.
(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)
that's a thing I haven't heard in a long time
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.
So kudos to maintainers of Arch!
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.
> 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.
What instability did you face?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
—update, sheesh. It’s not even incubating.
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."
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.
I can't speak of their server/enterprise business, however.
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.
That was on the consumer side though.
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.
Back in the day a guy was collocated.
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.
Warranties don't usually cover damage on the part of the user/negligence.
> I'd suggest renewing the warranties until EoL of your laptop as these service trips will likely become a bi-annual fixture.
I've had it for about 2.5 years and haven't had any other issues (beyond Dell's idiotic choice to only support Modern Standby S-states).
Not private equity exactly, but he personally bought up 51% of the shares.
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).
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.
I can't name a single example.
Private equity is incompatible with "optimism" and "hope".
Even worse when it is the same company that got them listed in the first place, implying that going public was a mistake.
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."
Archive link: https://archive.is/OH9QF
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.
Can you elaborate please?
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.
Let's see if the next try gets them somewhere.
> 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.