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SUSE Linux Sold for $2.5 Billion
British software company Micro Focus International has agreed to sell SUSE Linux and its associated software business to Swedish private equity group EQT Partners for $2.535 billion.
Also at The Register, Linux Journal, MarketWatch, and Reuters.
Previously: SuSE Linux has a New Owner
HPE Wraps Up $8.8bn Micro Focus Software Dump Spin-Off
Related: SUSE Pledges Endless Love for btrfs; Says Red Hat's Dumping Irrelevant
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SUSE Linux Sold for $2.535 Billion
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Possessions increase to fill the space available for their storage.
-- Ryan
(Score: 5, Interesting) by frojack on Monday July 02 2018, @06:41PM (17 children)
MicroFocus, and Novel and Attachmate, before them, have been systematically destroying the brand.
They treat it as an old pair of shoes purchased in a garage sale along with pots, pans, and used furniture.
Novel forced it into an unholy alliance with Microsoft.
Microfocus hasn't a single clue what to do with it.
Suse was one of the premier paid and free distros, for a long long time. You could buy servers with SLES from Dell. They were cost competitive with RedHat, and easily cheaper than Microsoft.
I've bought their boxed sets, paid for multiple license subscriptions for their Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) versions and used Opensuse for decades.
I was fine with the knowledge that Opensuse was somewhat a test bed for SLES. You got the new toys sooner. Used to be you could email Hubert Mantel and get a polite reply, even though it wasn't the best use of his time.
But they've lost their way, and their quality has been sliding down hill for the last several releases. The Opensuse "board" is about as anti-user as any I've seen, berating people on their mailing lists, threatening to shut down the mailing lists if people don't agree with them, all while insisting Opensuse is a "community distro". They can no longer win Municipal contracts in their native Germany. They are releasing their flagship products with obsolete (EOL) and deprecated kernels that can't handle modern hardware.
They do have some amazing validation and testing infrastructure (much of which is used by many other distros).
Hopefully this group of owners can shed the Opensuse board entirely, break the SLES product out of its hide-bound ways of built in obsolescence, and stop wasting the bulk of their developer talent chasing BTRFS, (which Joe User doesn't need and can't afford, and Corporate User can't trust.)
I'd like to see them revived. In the meantime, my daily driver on several workstations is Manjaro with SLES still running on the servers.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @06:46PM (3 children)
I once tried Suse, starting from their damn slow Yawn package manager, that experience sucked so much, that never again.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by shrewdsheep on Monday July 02 2018, @08:34PM (1 child)
These days are gone and package management is just fine by now, but your experience indeed represents many of similar kind. Opensuse has produced too many unstable distros in the recent past (11.x/12.x/42.0) blatantly ignorant of any kind of usability, this was pointed out by GP (13.x was very good, BTW). A logical consequence would be to replace the Opensuse board but that seems to be factually impossible, watch a conference video on the opensuse youtube channel. I am still with Opensuse due to my understanding of the distribution but I am otherwise unwilling to contribute due to these endless hours I needed to spend on getting a usable system.
That being said, you can get a stable system if you install Leap (the non-rolling distribution) for which you have to manually upgrade several components (kernel, depending on hardware, perl using perlbrew). This is due to one of the recent mistakes to unify Leap and SLES on a common base. It was sold as a benefit to the opensuse user for being "enterprise", however, it only means outdated packages in practice and only makes it easier for SLES to pull more current releases.
What are the strong points? You can very efficiently post own packages and make them available for install (OBS), the updates for Leap have become very reliable, and package management works very well. For example, when 42.0 was announced I did an upgrade very shortly after release as the 13.x had extremely smooth upgrades. I was shocked by what was done to the distribution and I could downgrade to 13.3 from a 42.0 system with a completely reliable system thereafter. I later upgraded from 13.3 to 42.1 which worked fine. 42.2, 42.3 were fine, I have not dared to touch 15.0 just yet.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday July 02 2018, @09:28PM
Ditto about the package management. Yast and Zypper are the best I've seen for power and options.
I in-place-updated from 13.2 directly to Leap 15.0, (not wipe and re-install) and it worked perfectly.
I did have some clean up after the fact, mostly deleting packages that had been dropped over the intervening releases.
But still, package management isn't fast. Never has been. I'm spoiled by Manjaro: Into and out of package management in seconds, just to check out some tidbit of information. I avoid that like the plague with Opensuse, because getting into Yast, twiddeling thumbs while waiting for it to update every repository, I've forgotten why I went in there in the first place.
Zypper (command line package management) has more options than Carter has Pills, none of them particularly obvious, keeps me using Yast.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by eravnrekaree on Monday July 02 2018, @10:44PM
You can use zypper for upgrades/ package install which is actually faster in my opinion than the apt-get. Try zypper, its great.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 02 2018, @06:53PM (7 children)
https://manjaro.org/ [manjaro.org]
"User friendly Arch" - how similar is this to "military intelligence"?
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Monday July 02 2018, @07:05PM (1 child)
You found the link, why not try it (in a VM perhaps) and see for yourself rather than posting cheapshots?
Either the KDE or XFCE versions make a good first installs. They have a Gnome version too, but the world does not need yet another gnome.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 02 2018, @10:39PM
So, leaving the world of cheapshots for a serious question: How's KDE with 4K displays these days?
Back when all my displays were 1920x1080, I used KDE as my daily driver and also as a product development target, and recommended it to the few people who asked... Then around 2014 I got a 4K laptop and I really couldn't deal with all the micro-fonts that showed up by default in Kubuntu 14.04... sure, it was fixable, everything is fixable, I just don't have the patience when other solutions work better out of the box.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday July 02 2018, @09:43PM
To paraphrase a bit, Arch *is* user-friendly, it's just really demanding about who it makes friends with and what it expects from said friends.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday July 03 2018, @01:54AM (2 children)
Arch is not user-unfreindly. Arch simply presumes that you know what you are doing, and know how to do it. And, Arch does provide a lot of cool documentation for those times when you knowledge falls short.
I'm not using Arch, primarily because the installers barfed on my SuperMicro build. I was in a hurry to get it running, and didn't want to spend the time required to figure things out. But, I was happy with Arch on my previous build. Maybe if I had chosen a different Arch installation media, it would have worked better.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03 2018, @03:04AM
you must follow the installation procedure on the wiki... if you did not chroot into your new system your doing it wrong
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 03 2018, @12:49PM
We have different definitions of user-unfriendly.
When I want a widget to do something for me, the number (and difficulty) of actions required to make the widget do the thing is inversely proportional to its user friendliness.
Requiring a certain amount of knowledge for efficiently accomplishing certain tasks could be acceptable, and make something "user friendly for knowledgeable users." When common tasks (like configuration of the OS to a desired state) require 10x or more the amount of time and effort, regardless of knowledge level, that falls short of what I would call user friendly.
OSs like Cent and Ubuntu are more or less: burn a USB, boot from that USB, accept all defaults, usable on 99% of common hardware. It doesn't take too many required configuration steps and trips to the cool documentation to make something 10x harder to use than that.
Windows has actually fallen behind Cent and Ubuntu when it comes to installer friendliness, they're dependent on vendors pre-installing to achieve their "good out of the box" experience.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Tuesday July 03 2018, @06:55AM
Manjaro is very user friendly if you want KDE. It is IMHO more user friendly that Kubuntu. If you like GNOME then go with Ubuntu.
Manjaro by default uses a wrapper over pacman [archlinux.fr] and also comes with UI for it (that I never use, but it works).
Really, imagine Kbuntu, then imagine it was as first class citizen of canonical-land as Ubuntu. That's Manjaro.
Just a happy user. All I had to do was forget about leaving systemd.
(Score: 2) by eravnrekaree on Monday July 02 2018, @10:42PM (3 children)
Your flat out wrong about btrfs. This is something that has appeal to common desktop users. You can easily add new hard drives to expand storage transparently and have the storage space integrated into the filesystem. COW snapshot features allow for a rollback of an upgrade (heaven forbid its necessary), making it easier to use for common users because this can be an easy way to reverse a problem, at least until a fix is made. btrfs is the best way forward and is a good investment in the distro and making it better for everyone. Its not just for servers, the features are invaluable for common desktop users. There are many features of btrfs that make it better for servers that also make it better for desktops, like improved reliability due to the COW architecture and improved performance. COW reliability, block checksums etc are even more necessary on a desktop system where they may not have a deluxe UPS. It is true that for most features, what improves things on a server also improves things on the desktop.
btrfs is mostly a stable filesystem anyway and the investments are being made by multiple companies.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday July 03 2018, @01:57AM
How big do you think a box need be? I already have apt-get with supercow powers. There isn't room for another cow in there.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Tuesday July 03 2018, @07:02AM (1 child)
I like the promises of btrfs, but damn is that unstable. I have data on a ssd formatted with btrfs as early as 6 months ago.
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Tuesday July 03 2018, @07:03AM
I have LOST data on a ssd formatted with btrfs as early as 6 months ago.
Let me get a cup of coffee, please.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03 2018, @12:25PM
Well, openSUSE board is *elected*, so you can vote who wins. Except maybe Richard Brown but then you can't win it all?
As for the new owners, they are investors, not managers that will come in and take over. They want to make money, not micromanage. Owners will not be making changes.