SUSE targets pre-summer IPO

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN2B12AD

by stryan • 5 years ago

136 99 5 years ago

reuters.com

jvalencia• 5 years ago

I'm curious if anyone knows why SUSE is going IPO?

mrweasel3• 5 years ago

Perhaps because they’re owned by an investment company who now want their money back.

The timing seems right, Redhat is now owned by IBM, so setting SuSE free to compete with Ubuntu and Redhat might be a smart move. Ubuntu is doing their own thing in many respects, and IBM pretty much removed RedHat from the stockmarket, and pissed of some people with CentOS. Those CentOS users need to look for a new distro.

smnrchrds2• 5 years ago

IBM pretty much removed RedHat from the market

Could you please elaborate on this?

ghaff8• 5 years ago

If someone is moving off on CentOS Linux and doesn't want to start paying for RHEL, why would they want to pay either SUSE or Canonical instead? Certainly they could move to openSUSE but that makes them SUSE users, not customers. And users who have demonstrated they're willing to go through a migration to avoid paying.

pelasaco4• 5 years ago

my guess is: Investors want to make a good exit and then try to sell it to SAP.

cognaitiv4• 5 years ago

So if SUSE IPOs at $8.3B, that represents an 320% appreciation or ~82% IRR from the Micro Focus sale in March of 2019 at $2.535. I wonder how much additional value is trapped inside MCRO.L/MFGP while it trades at a COBOL valuation? Looking at you Vertica...

mrweasel3• 5 years ago

Micro Focus is an insanely weird company. It’s just a strange mix of software companies collected during the years, seamingly without any sort of overall plan.

ghaff8• 5 years ago

There have been a bunch of companies like that over the years. See also CA. What tends to happen is someone has a grand vision of how this acquisition with dovetail neatly with the existing portfolio and the integration gets only part-way there, strategies or the market shifts, and you're left with yet another product that sells enough to keep plugging along but doesn't really fit with anything else.

9ijdPuvp• 5 years ago

Seems they are following the nigerian price playbook - buying customers not technology. The worse the tech is, the better are the customers still using it. And divesting suse when they realized it has enduring value.

azinman22• 5 years ago

Quite frankly I’m surprised they still exist. Is it mostly European contracts? You never really hear about SUSE anymore…

aplanas2• 5 years ago

SUSE bought Rancher in 2020, and that was also in the news.

ghaff8• 5 years ago

They're a German-based company and, yes, they've always been bigger in Europe than in the US (relative to the market as a whole).

_wldu2• 5 years ago

They once had one of the best KDE desktops available.

space_ghost• 5 years ago

I have Very fond memories of KDE ~3 running on SuSE 8.1ish in the early 2000s. My XFCE setup today is far cleaner and more efficient, but it doesn't give me the same sense of satisfaction.

throw2737• 5 years ago

Opensuse still does. Kubuntu or Fedora are far behind.

Barrin92• 5 years ago

Googling around a little bit it actually seems like they have a lot of their largest customers in their US. Apparently Whole Foods, Walmart a bunch of other retailers and several American government institutions like Fema and several city administrations.

Wouldn't surprise me if the US is actually their largest market.

dralley2• 5 years ago

I believe Lowes (Hardware) also.

bpodgursky• 5 years ago

Walmart is going BIG on Kubernetes (like, 100% full-throttle), so they might need to get struck from this list soon...

dan_quixote• 5 years ago

Continental Europe was by far their largest market just a couple years ago. North American expansion was always a matter of discussion (if not investment) but it has only really picked up steam in the last year or so.

barkingcat• 5 years ago

You hardly hear about them, doesn't mean they don't exist.

SUSE is a large distribution based in Germany, in Europe they have significant inroads in government contracts.

azinman22• 5 years ago

I didn’t say they didn’t exist, but clearly it’s not just me who never really think about them:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=U...

krylon4• 5 years ago

Last time I checked, a number of Cray supercomputers were using it in some capacity.

codegeek2• 5 years ago

Circa 2001/2002, I had a lot of fun learning SUSE Linux where we had CDs of the OS that we could install. I remember being able to do a partition on my Windows (98/XP) and installing SuSE Linux on it. Fun times.

posterboy• 5 years ago

I remember getting a CD of Suse with a C't magazine and that the installation process simply borked in the middle after a long while.

That was that until it worked like a charm with better driver support (and a Debian based distro) a few years later.

txutxu• 5 years ago

CDs were common in redhat (still without the E of Enterprise linux), debian, slackware and all...

But what to say about the manuals?

Those manuals and books included with the CDs, in the box.

For me they were a catalyst in my Linux learning.

Really good quality manuals, with reference tables, and covering many (many) topics. From the the graphical environment to the command line, from the administration of the local system, to network services, good structure, nice tips, cheatsheets, reference tables, even covering kernel compilation!

As you say, they did include everything needed, to live together with win98... tools, floppy images, etc... and the documentation about howto do it beforehand.

In that modem times, with low speed internet, the CDs where valuable, indeed.

But those books included in the box, for people like me in such times (self-taught beginner with Linux) those manuals were like gold!

Did use my first linux from a CD in a computers magazine.

Did play with redhat, and debian, then I did buy my first suse box with suse 6.0 (around 1999), and did buy again the box for suse 7 and 8.

Latter I did get faster internet, and did jump 100% to debian for everything. But I still have those manuals with my books.

The complete package (cds + books) is something that I remember fondly for how useful it was to me, and a lot of respect for the work of the people who made it.

tazjin• 5 years ago

+1 - I learned a lot from those giant manuals. I also remembered calling their (free at the time, I believe?) customer support hotline about issues with some printer and the guy dictating a bunch of kernel parameters to me over the phone (which did fix the issue!). Different times ...

NikolaNovak• 5 years ago

Agreed. I have dozen books on Linux in my home office and of course there's the Internets...

But I've never ever found something so cohesive, comprehensive,understandable and with a great guided curve. I kept them long past obsolescence as they just couldn't be replaced by anything better :-/

thetopher• 5 years ago

Just to add another tale from the past:

Sometime in the late 90s I ordered a Red Hat CD from cheapbytes.com (CD burners weren't common yet). I didn't have a credit card yet, but I did have a checking account, so I paid for the order by mailing in a check.

ibejoeb2• 5 years ago

Was it SUSE that had tetris (or maybe pacman) available while the CD installer was running?

pelasaco4• 5 years ago

that was Caldera!

nix232• 5 years ago

Suse has a special bootloader around Christmas:

https://siasky.net/NACTymsHp70KBDeyHDUlyO-XHW6nMidXO-4PM4aYy...

krylon4• 5 years ago

Me too, but 2000/2001 - I still have the box and the CDs. SuSE Linux 7.0 Personal Edition.

I did not anticipate how much of an impact on my life that was going to have.

TL;DR - Go Suse! (-:

aplanas2• 5 years ago

Fun times

Is still fun! There is Tumbleweed, a full rolling distribution (all packages with its own update cadence, and OBS fully building the dependencies that are impacted). There is also MicroOS, a transactional OS (BtrFS subvolumes for rootfs are read-only, and the update happens in the snapshot that will be activated after the reboot, providing a self-healing system when an upgrade does not affect the running environment)

Also Leap, but this is indeed boring (15.3 will be based fully in SLE binaries)

krylon4• 5 years ago

What goes around, comes around - I am writing this comment on a laptop running Tumbleweed, with another one running Leap 15.2 sitting next to me.

Coming back to Suse was a bit like coming home. (-:

TheCondor• 5 years ago

It really feels like there is a Suse renaissance happening. MicroOS is particularly interesting.

I wish them nothing but success, now that IBM has RHEL, maybe SLES will get new attention.

groundthrower• 5 years ago

My first experience with Linux was also after ordering their CD package... maybe around 5 discs? I almost remember first time ever logging in through the terminal after installation. Wow

bengale• 5 years ago

I remember getting my grandad to buy me a copy of SUSE from pcworld back around that time. I completely destroyed my home pc trying to install it, but I learned a lot putting all that right.

Klonoar• 5 years ago

I remember buying SUSE in a damn Best Buy. What a world...

raverbashing• 5 years ago

In a way, the pet->cattle transition "killed the Linux distro". Yes they're still important but commoditized

In a way it's a bit sad. The Linux desktop never was and we got Android instead

The king is dead, long live the king

amarshall• 5 years ago

The Linux desktop never was

Speak for yourself, my desktop is Linux now after more than a decade of Mac. (But I know what you mean: it never really gained huge traction.)

fxtentacle• 5 years ago

We got a usable Linux-inspired OS instead of suffering through the raw deal.

It's all the little things like bad window management (can't batch close from alt tab screen) to horrible UX (the new folder button hidden behind a hamburger menu) to idiotic naming (what do thunar and totem do?) and a good dose of not fixing the bugs that your users care about, that made Linux OS un-sellable.

redisman• 5 years ago

Linux desktop is pretty great for devs. Just like Linux server.

dralley2• 5 years ago

Desktop isn't profitable

robszumski• 5 years ago

With containers you now have a ton of Linux userlands running around, so you need a sane system for dealing with that. For the container runtimes and cgroup features, you still need a distro that maintains this stuff correctly. cgroups v1 to v2 is gonna be rough for some folks.

skrtskrt• 5 years ago

It seems like Linux desktop is more popular and close to legit than ever.

I think the gaming -> PC building pipeline is getting people educated and interested in the nitty gritty of their home computers, plus there are more people exposed to Linux now than ever just through a giant and growing industry of software devs.

arbitrage• 5 years ago

the linux desktop has existed and been usable for twenty years.

if you want a windows desktop, buy a windows license.

if you want linux to look like windows, well then yeah ... you're going to be disappointed.

unixhero• 5 years ago

This is great for Linux

z9e• 5 years ago

I have never actually seen SUSE used in the wild (running services in a data center or Cloud), it's always been CentOS / RHEL, or Ubuntu.

SUSE is a great distro though and I'm happy to see this. Does anyone have any anecdata where they've seen it most heavily used?

hitpointdrew• 5 years ago

I hear it is used quite a lot in Europe. My experience is similar to yours, RHEL or Ubuntu, but I am based in the US.

I played a bit with Open SUSE on my home machine, I wouldn't use it a work simply because there aren't as many repos for the package mangager, for instance if you want to install kubeadm you would have to build from source.

adamcstephens• 5 years ago

I’ve found many yum repos that aren’t specifically opensuse repos still work. Add in the OBS repos and I have been impressed by the available software.

Vogtinator• 5 years ago

kubeadm is in the repo for years meanwhile.

Cu3PO42• 5 years ago

While this may be true, I've also never needed as few third party repositories as I do with openSUSE (particularly Tumbleweed). Virtually everything I've needed is in the official repos in modern versions. (Arch + AUR is a similar story, but honestly I prefer my experience with openSUSE.)

dologatag• 5 years ago

"Does anyone have any anecdata where they've seen it most heavily used?"

In germany. It's quite widespread there in companies and public institutions. I prefer SLES over red hat/centos, but that, of course, is just a matter of personal taste.

nudpiedo• 5 years ago

I've seen in a few datacenters in Europe. At the end companies decide based on license and support more than tech.

chrisseaton• 5 years ago

Does anyone have any anecdata where they've seen it most heavily used?

Continental European enterprises.

strictnein2• 5 years ago

Yep. SAP utilizes it, for instance.

When I was there, my laptop was a ridiculously overspec'd Windows system (with a high end Nvidia Quadro for unknown reasons), and they had us run a SUSE VM with IntelliJ for our dev environment.

pelasaco4• 5 years ago

A lot of the mainframes out there are running SUSE. SUSE for S/390.

ghaff8• 5 years ago

Way back, SUSE had something like 90% of the Linux marketshare on IBM mainframes. IBM's initial Linux work on the platform was done in Germany (Bohlingen I believe.) That eroded over time as Linux on the mainframe went more mainstream and Red Hat added similar mainframe support features to what SUSE had.

PascLeRasc• 5 years ago

I use it everyday! I work in a highly regulated industry and for some reason it's the only "validated" distribution that we could get approved to run internal web apps. I'm pretty sure that's false, but I'll take any Linux I can get over Windows, and its tools for system management are actually pretty great.

__coaxialcabal• 5 years ago

Not that I've used it in several years, but Teradata and AsterData used to run on SUSE. It was extremely stable in my experience.

bobthecowboy• 5 years ago

Both definitely still did as of the end of October when I worked at Teradata.

waiseristy2• 5 years ago

A relatively recent development, but OpenSUSE is shaping up to be one of the preferred distros for automotive embedded linux applications.

cpach• 5 years ago

Aha. Perhaps they have some kind of collaboration with Porsche/Volkswagen or Opel...?

LeoPanthera• 5 years ago

openSUSE is my daily OS, mostly because the Packman repository is so comprehensive.

iso8859-1• 5 years ago

YaST (Yet another Setup Tool) is amazing. It allows you to configure your system using a GUI, just like on Windows. It is an important on-ramp to Linux.

krylon4• 5 years ago

Back in the day, they also had SaX (SuSE advanced X-configurator or something like that), a GUI tool to configure XFree86. That was something I sorely missed when I started using other Linux distros and *BSD - editing the config file by hand was so painful there's an xkcd about it: https://xkcd.com/963/

trollied• 5 years ago

I thought SAP bought them a while ago. Looks like I’m wrong. No idea where I got that from :(

strictnein2• 5 years ago

Both German and SAP utilizes them a fair amount.

speakspokespok• 5 years ago

Somewhere around 2001 I bought Suse 7.X. It came in a fold out with each fold carrying a CD. 6 folds for 6 CDs but the 7th fold was the DVD and it had all the 6 CDs of data plus more. That just about blew my teenage mind.

Aboh33• 5 years ago

Also echoing some comments here. Suse was and remains one of my favorite distros to this day and was instrumental in my learning nix. Spent alot of time building opensuse distros back in the day with their build service. Just a little disappointed the IPO will not be in US Markets otherwise I'd buy

mathattack• 5 years ago

They’ve joined RedHat in pouring a big bucket of sleazy business behavior onto the open source movement.

SUSE targets pre-summer IPO

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