Interesting play - basically they will offer generic enterprise-grade Linux support, with a not-so-veiled view to slowly replace existing installations (typically RHEL or CentOS, both explicitly namechecked) with SuSE, leveraging "SuSE Manager".
It's clearly a reaction to the civil war in the RedHat world.
SUSE has offered some level of support for RHEL/CentOS for a long time. They’ve had various programs over the years, long before this, to support customers who are on RHEL but might migrate to SLES.
The specific SKUs and details change from time to time, but it’s not really a new thing. As a trailing competitor, it’s a reasonable thing to do.
Oh man does SUSE(often via Microsoft referrals) provide support for a lot of Linux distros. If you are willing, they'll pretty much support any reasonable distro.
Ages ago at a large managed hosting company we had 10s of 10000s of RHEL licenses but we also had a lot of people using CentOS for various reasons. Long story short, since CentOS only supported the current point release at the time we had a lot of boxes out there that needed critical patches.
SUSE provided us with CVE fixes for any CentOS release we wanted to support and we were able to distribute them via our internal RHN system to CentOS machines.
I've been working on SUSE Manager and we offer support with RHEL clients and all the clones like CENTOS and others. We actually are cheaper for rhel licenses. (you don't' get the same support ilke redhat but if you just wanted updates we can do it. )
SuSE's bread and butter is professional services. They don't care what software you use, as long as you pay SuSE to consult on it.
From a practical perspective: I wouldn't use them. Their acquisition of Rancher was/is terrible. I literally couldn't give them my money without one of those stupid sales calls. Their website doesn't even have a working contact form; I had to go to their Slack to get some random engineer's attention. I'm told by colleagues that they ignore your (paid) support tickets. I have worked for enough pain-in-the-ass enterprises that I will avoid them at all costs.
Interesting… my experience has been the opposite, except for getting support. I prefer being able to get the product for free immediately and then chat about support later. It’s why we use Rancher, because it takes 20min to set up with Helm, vs like Tanzu where you have to have. an entire call and licensing and accounts to even download anything. Or D2iQ where you need to fumble with getting everything set up for a while with the sales and technical people.
Rancher has been great for me with around 200 clusters. They don’t support temporary creds for IAM stuff, so I have to provision EKS clusters on my own.
We pay for paid support and have very little problems getting them on the phone, but it is generally a consulting firm that ends up helping.
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It is but OpenSUSE is free and binary-compatible since the last release - just like CentOS used to be for RHEL. SLES is also cheaper from my experience.
I'm considering trying SuSE MicroOS as a desktop for a while. Any thoughts? I tried suse for a few weeks about a quarter century ago then went back to slackware, so I have no relevant experience.
I haven't tries MicroOS, so I cannot comment on that. I use both Leap and Tumbleweed and am quite happy with both.
Tumbleweed occasionally breaks something, but but it uses snapper to create a snapshot before each update, so if there's a problem, I boot into the most recent stable snapshot and wait for a couple of days before I update again.
Leap is very stable in my experience, while also offering relatively up-to-date packages.
The main problem is that out of the box, support for multimedia is not very good, but there is community-run repository with everything I need, i.e. video codecs and such.
If you have a spare computer, I suggest just installing it on that and giving it a try. Otherwise, a virtual machine. It's a lot more heavyweight than Slackware, obviously, and if you dislike systemd, you might not like it very much. But I don't know your preferences and requirements are, so the best I can say is to give it a try and decide for yourself.
I use openSUSE Aeon (former MicroOS Desktop) for about a year. It is based on rolling Tumleweed and the system is stable. It updates on a background automatically.
If you are not looking for a fine tunning your system and expects stable (yet bleeding edge) base, which just works, I can recommend it.
The biggest thing is that the model pushes one to embrace usage of a distrobox/flatpak.
At work we traditionally have almost only SLES servers with some Oracle Linux and RHEL ones.
In the last months we gained a few more RHEL servers, which I needed to provide updates for. Our servers don't have internet connection so some sort of mirror server is required. For SUSE we use their free-of-cost RMT (and the older SMT) mirror services.
For RHEL something like this doesn't seem to exist or looks a little kludgy. So I bought some licenses for SLL:
* there where still some "repo errors" when changing from RHEL to SLL on a existing server
* I opened a support ticket, there was no finger pointing to RedHat and one or two weeks later the issue was resolved :)
Didn't realize witnessing a market leader flex their strength and have it backfire so badly would be so cathartic. Wish it would happen to other businesses more often.
Readit News
Interesting play - basically they will offer generic enterprise-grade Linux support, with a not-so-veiled view to slowly replace existing installations (typically RHEL or CentOS, both explicitly namechecked) with SuSE, leveraging "SuSE Manager".
It's clearly a reaction to the civil war in the RedHat world.
The specific SKUs and details change from time to time, but it’s not really a new thing. As a trailing competitor, it’s a reasonable thing to do.
Ages ago at a large managed hosting company we had 10s of 10000s of RHEL licenses but we also had a lot of people using CentOS for various reasons. Long story short, since CentOS only supported the current point release at the time we had a lot of boxes out there that needed critical patches.
SUSE provided us with CVE fixes for any CentOS release we wanted to support and we were able to distribute them via our internal RHN system to CentOS machines.
It made the auditors happy.
The date of the announcement is January 2022 so it can't be that.
From a practical perspective: I wouldn't use them. Their acquisition of Rancher was/is terrible. I literally couldn't give them my money without one of those stupid sales calls. Their website doesn't even have a working contact form; I had to go to their Slack to get some random engineer's attention. I'm told by colleagues that they ignore your (paid) support tickets. I have worked for enough pain-in-the-ass enterprises that I will avoid them at all costs.
Rancher has been great for me with around 200 clusters. They don’t support temporary creds for IAM stuff, so I have to provision EKS clusters on my own.
We pay for paid support and have very little problems getting them on the phone, but it is generally a consulting firm that ends up helping.
Yeah... No need to fear of vendor lock-in huh?
SUSE may be a viable alternative depending on the workload requirements and cost. RHEL's push could be Red Hat's loss.
“The more you tighten your grip, the more systems will slip through your fingers.”
But SuSE Linux was my first Linux distro, an for the past couple of years[0], I've been a happy openSUSE user, so I'm not that cynical.
[0] I still have the box with the CDs and manuals sitting on my bookshelf. :-)
EDIT: Forgot a word.
Tumbleweed occasionally breaks something, but but it uses snapper to create a snapshot before each update, so if there's a problem, I boot into the most recent stable snapshot and wait for a couple of days before I update again.
Leap is very stable in my experience, while also offering relatively up-to-date packages.
The main problem is that out of the box, support for multimedia is not very good, but there is community-run repository with everything I need, i.e. video codecs and such.
If you have a spare computer, I suggest just installing it on that and giving it a try. Otherwise, a virtual machine. It's a lot more heavyweight than Slackware, obviously, and if you dislike systemd, you might not like it very much. But I don't know your preferences and requirements are, so the best I can say is to give it a try and decide for yourself.
If you are not looking for a fine tunning your system and expects stable (yet bleeding edge) base, which just works, I can recommend it.
The biggest thing is that the model pushes one to embrace usage of a distrobox/flatpak.
It’s almost identical in capability, but with MUCH less pre-installed package layered over it (IE: it comes with the Firefox flatpak pre-installed).
I enjoy that it’s a rolling release as well personally
In the last months we gained a few more RHEL servers, which I needed to provide updates for. Our servers don't have internet connection so some sort of mirror server is required. For SUSE we use their free-of-cost RMT (and the older SMT) mirror services.
For RHEL something like this doesn't seem to exist or looks a little kludgy. So I bought some licenses for SLL: * there where still some "repo errors" when changing from RHEL to SLL on a existing server * I opened a support ticket, there was no finger pointing to RedHat and one or two weeks later the issue was resolved :)
I would say it's at least worth a try.
Which software?