When we bring a problem to them, which we pay them for, the turn around time is awful, and about 2/5 cases I end up having to break out the debugging tools and root cause/fix fix it because their support engineers can't be bothered.
Especially their nVidia support. Worse than useless.
I’ve often wondered if the support is better if one is on the “correct”side of the Atlantic.
At a minimum, one would have the benefit of having time zone alignment with Engineering staff.
“We’re waiting for Engineering in Germany to get back to us.” is a common refrain.
From my experience in Germany, customer support for all types of consumer businesses from ISP, shops, gyms, property management, in general, is a joke, so that stereotype tracks. You need to contact them via a letter from a lawyer or consumer protection agencies to get them to move their ass when you have an issue, otherwise they ignore you till that scary legal letter comes, at which point they go like "oh yeah, we were just about to get back to your customer right now, no need to take us to court over it".
In US (and UK as well) the customer is always right, in Germany (and France) the customer support is always right and the customer should be sorry for daring to bother the customer support with their problem.
That's why they have no international tech companies, because their mentality can't survive in the "customer is always right" cutthroat environment.
So it's not really boggling to see how SUSE failed to get traction despite being technically superior from my PoV.
German companies thrive when the product they're selling involves a lot of made up red tape and bureaucracy (cough, AUTOSAR, cough) and customers are willing to wait months for a reply because they have nowhere else to go. The moment they DO have somewhere else to go, they take their money elsewhere, which is why German industry is in its multi year recession.
Well, they do have SAP. Though based on what I've heard their support is not exactly top notch
SUSE also really like their "I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition!"-style random subscription audits too.
nVidia is neither Java nor a web server.
* All 3rd party binaries such as fonts, sounds, artwork and branding
* Packages without public available source
* Packages with non-Open Source license
nVidia not being mentioned, means they're not excluded.
nVidia certainly seem to think that their drivers are open source [0]. You'll also note that nVidia seem to think SUSE will provide source for those driver modules, in that announcement.
[0] https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-sourc...
it's honestly a crime that they don't get more traction. Tooling they've put out like the Open Build Service (which is distro agnostic), is fantastic. I've been using Tumbleweed on dev machines for a long time, and the fact that they ship fully tested images is imo just a vastly better way to do a rolling release.