The History of S.u.S.E

https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-history-of-suse

by ibobev • 1 year ago

243 128 1 year ago

whalesalad2• 1 year ago

My first introduction to linux was SuSE 7.2. Got it in the physical box from a local Borders bookstore. I think I was about 12-13 years old. Installed it on the family Gateway computer (PIII, 128mb ram).

mtillman• 1 year ago

My boss had me install SuSE 4.? but I reverted to Slackware after a few months. Yast was pretty cool from what I recall.

johng• 1 year ago

Slackware was my first distro as well... want to say kernel was around 0.94 or thereabouts.

quink• 1 year ago

SuSE 6.3 for me. With the handbook and everything on CDs it's the sort of introduction to Linux as physical artifacts that you had to deal with. It defined a life-changing experience that's near impossible to avoid. Because you sure weren't able to pull a Docker container of any size in two seconds flat, you weren't able to Google for whatever (Linux Documentation Project was the only website worth visiting), and what you had was what you had, none of this having the latest from github at any time.

It was nice to have these limitations that forced you to sit down and just be with it, free of all the distractions and doubts that arise from always seeing the latest on Hacker News. You knew it was good, you knew you had it all, and you could make the world your oyster with ancient Perl and PHP, documentation and all included right there on those CDs.

mongol• 1 year ago

My first PC was a used IBM PS/2 Model 70. 2 MB RAM, 60 MB HD. It could not run Linux due to the MCA bus. I lost one year of Linux use because of it, until I bought a Pentium 75.

Bootvis• 1 year ago

I have a very similar experience but using 6.4 installed from 6 (six) CD's.

Took me forever to get internet working, first dial-up then ISDN.

mattl• 1 year ago

Yeah I used to love the era of boxed Linux distros with manuals in bookstores and computer stores.

FlyingSnake• 1 year ago

I remember fondly my first brush with SuSE around 2005, and I was blown away how polished and professional it was. I was a Red Hat user then and later moved on to Ubuntu so I found the YaST based bit foreign to my taste. Those were the days of wild distro-hopping.

Pentium 4, 128MB RAM

lycopodiopsida• 1 year ago

I still have a full box of SuSE 7.3 on my shelf, the first (and only) Linux disto I've bought. :)

jmclnx• 1 year ago

Very informative, I knew Slackware Translation was the first product, but I did not know how they went from Slackware to their own distro.

happyweasel• 1 year ago

IMHO, Deutsche Linux-Distribution (DLD) was the first german linux distribution (first release in 1992).

FirmwareBurner• 1 year ago

So it's not just a meme that Germans like to put "Deutsche" in front of every product/company name, it's the reality. How imaginative, the marketing departments who come up with these names must be making bank.

skrebbel2• 1 year ago

I mean, Americans put "National" in front of everything. At least the German version suggests some level of awareness of a world beyond the borders.

pvitz• 1 year ago

That the distribution was a fully translated system together with a thick manual (of course also in German) was the whole point and idea. Your comment is too dismissive in my opinion.

Sweepi• 1 year ago

Well who ever came up with "Deutsche Linux-Distribution" most likely did not have a marketing department.

Besides, putting "German" in your product name at the time (199x) actually was a savvy marketing move, especially if you are the first in a particular niche. There were lots of buyers who wanted to buy fully translated software back then, and the sticker "Software and Manual in German" probably is the most successful sale booster of the 80ies and 90ies in Germany.

This of course does not even touch the subject of localization issues, just to name 2 from the top of my hat:

[1]For years (maybe a decade?) Apple maps had issues if you tried to enter an address the "German" way: <Streetname> <Number> instead of <Number> <Streetname>.

[2]To this day websites ask me for "states" in my shipping address. Yes, Germany has states. We mostly dont care about them. No one puts the state in a shipping address. Shops, please stop getting annoyed when I dont know if you expect me to enter a 2-or 3-length string as abbreviation for my state (which you dont need for anything, anyway). VAT is a federal tax, therefore its not different from state to state.

hnlmorg• 1 year ago

Every country does.

American Express

British Telecom

Etc

layer8• 1 year ago

It literally just meant a Linux distribution with German localization.

ta1243• 1 year ago

So it's not just a meme that Americans like to slap a flag on everything they import from China, it's the reality. How imaginative, the marketing departments who come up with these names must be making bank.

mdip• 1 year ago

I've been a user of openSUSE since "openSUSE", nearly. It's my daily driver, today.

I want to say I was playing with Mandrake, Red Hat and a little Gentoo at the time. I started using it regularly around 2010ish - I was working at a Windows shop and had a pretty elaborate home lab with Windows servers and domain controllers so I could do things at home "before trying that on corporate." I remember the deciding factor became "I can use YaST to add this device to my domain controller and login with domain credentials easier than I can add a Windows box to the domain." And I found that was often the theme with many tasks, whether they're unusual like "logging into a Windows host" or mundane. Over the years, the software options available have been pretty incredible. I run Tumbleweed in most places and it's, by far, the smoothest "bleeding edge rolling update" distribution I've worked with. `Snapper` was my first experience with "working rollback."

Because of the fine folks at openSUSE, I went from "knowing nothing about Linux" to "using it as my primary desktop" and I'm mostly a .NET developer. So many development tasks are just easier to do under Linux, whether it's the pesky node or python module that needs gcc/LLVM to compile some dependency and the expansive set of software repositories and available `.rpm`s make it all very straight-forward.

I recently picked up a higher-end AMD GPU and was dismayed to find that ROCm support was limited, mostly, to Ubuntu[0]. I got everything mostly working in Tumbleweed -- interestingly, most of the AI workloads I put it through worked as well in Tumbleweed as they did in Ubuntu following the official documentation but a few of the ROCm utilities didn't run. I ended up reloading with Ubuntu and quickly regretted the situation. Stupidly, I assumed doing a distribution update would be flawless like it typically is with Tumbleweed. After all, the only way to actually update Tumbleweed is via a distribution update, and 2K packages later it very rarely fails to boot. I knew right away that I wouldn't have the safety of being able to pick the previous snapshot but I was surprised that when it failed half-way through it didn't bother to roll anything back; it simply left my machine in a broken state that booted directly to a text console. Having re-loaded this box four times in the prior few days, I decided to go back to what I knew.

About the only complaint I have centers around their default choice of `btrfs` for the filesystem. While I like the CoW functionality (the only particular "advanced" feature that I utilize with `btrfs`), it seems to excel -- mostly -- at teaching me about filesystem recovery. My home lab isn't anywhere near as elaborate as it had been in the past. It seems even on a UPS with proper shutdowns it's ridiculously prone to getting itself into a state where a `btrfs restore` is the only way to recover from a filesystem problem. Every single time I get everything back except for some random cache/tmp/log file but I need to dig up or purchase a volume of equal size to restore it to, meaning I have to keep around an empty drive at least as large as my largest volume. It seems to me "if the filesystem can literally restore everything except for a file or two that has become corrupted" it should offer a "dangerous" option to do so online. To this day I have never had to restore everything from an actual backup, it's always gotten back everything important simply restoring the broken filesystem to a new volume and the filesystem becomes corrupted without explanation -- power didn't fail, the system had a clean shutdown, it just randomly goes "read-only" with a guarantee that the next boot will drop to an emergency console. Unfortunately, CoW helps a lot with the work I do and ends up being worth the grief involved. While I've had fewer failures in the last couple of years and an easier time recovering from those failures, it's often a full day's work to get everything right, again.

[0] Support exists for Leap but the repositories were broken for a solid month while I was setting things up.

ghaff2• 1 year ago

FWIW, I believe btrfs is also the default FS for Fedora these days (though not Red Hat Enterprise Linux).

BSDobelix5• 1 year ago

True but SUSE (the enterprise version) is pretty clear about the use of btrfs, just use it for the OS (snapshots), the "data" partition should always be XFS.

darkwater2• 1 year ago

I want to say I was playing with Mandrake, Red Hat and a little Gentoo at the time.

I don't know when you started playing with all of these and for how long, so it can be absolutely how you said (in the end, it's your own life!) but chances are you mostly used Mandriva, since the Mandrake name disappeared in 2005.

kergonath2• 1 year ago

I can’t all for the parent obviously, but my experience is similar and I was using Red Hat and Mandrake around 1999.

dizhn2• 1 year ago

No snapper, no rollbacks without btrfs I'm afraid.

lproven5• 1 year ago

I believe that it works with LVM snapshots as well, but then you've traded the problem of Btrfs for the problem of LVM.

lproven5• 1 year ago

it seems to excel -- mostly -- at teaching me about filesystem recovery.

100% this.

I worked for SUSE for 4 years and I like the distro, but I unhappily and reluctantly got used to the distro destroying its own root partition a couple of times a year.

In the end I reinstalled on plain old ext4, and then it became rock solid, but you lose snapper and the rollback functionality, and they are handy.

Levitating• 1 year ago

I can't believe YaST is that old

Deeg9rie9usi2• 1 year ago

Don't forget about LST: https://www-lst-de.translate.goog/de/main.php?id=02&_x_tr_sl...

usrusr• 1 year ago

Which later became Caldera Deutschland and played a bit of a role in Caldera Open Linux. And which happened to have its offices well within commuting range of everything SuSE. I've been wondering about local connections ever since I recognized the Caldera sign on that building (back in the 20th).

riedel• 1 year ago

Does somebody remember Halloween Linux as another German translation [0]. Still have some CD ROM lying around.

[0] https://www-pro--linux-de.translate.goog/artikel/2/364/hallo...

dmacvicar• 1 year ago

I worked there for more than a decade, and I can never highlight enough:

- How great the place was for those involved in the open-source ecosystem

- How great Novell and Attachmate were as owners

The company had, like many others, good and tough times, but the people were very passionate about it.

I will never stop feeling lucky for it being part of me for so many years.

mugsie• 1 year ago

I was only there for a year or two, but it was a great place to work, and I 100% agree on the upstream contributors, but the main thing I will remember is how much people cared.

In some cases, waaayyy too much about little things, but a lot of the time about the right thing to do for the product and for the open source community around it.

I think the main thing I will miss is sitting down on a Friday afternoon and reading the dev list (devel@ I think?), it was a thing of beauty.

PeterStuer• 1 year ago

"How great Novell and Attachmate were as owners"

Could you elaborate on that? What made them great?

jasoneckert• 1 year ago

I agree that Novell was great for SUSE back in the day.

I co-wrote 6 academic textbooks with Novell on SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for Thompson / Course Technology, and I have fond memories of the whole team at Novell during that time.

Each time I was asked to write another textbook for Novell on SUSE, the publisher used YaST (Yet another SUSE Textbook) in the subject line of the email.

Oh, and yes, SUSE is a great distro!

_kdave• 1 year ago

How great Novell and Attachmate were as owners

This is the opposite how I and not only I remember it. Novell did save S.u.S.E. in 2005 by the highly controversial deal. And then started to slowly dissolve its internal identity within the whole company and almost succeeded. The Novell management was incompetent, trying to save it's dying business by bending what SUSE was doing. Barely survived the 2008+ crisis.

Attachmate, another legacy product company was interested in Novell due to assets and customers. That there was a business unit (SUSE) that was quite capable was merely a surprise to the new owners. They let us live and do our jobs. Which paid off because Novell died in a year or so after attempts to salvage it. The Attachmate management wanted to make money, no interest in SUSE. You can call it good management, but mainly due to the fact that the accounting was internally split from Novell and the numbers did not lie.

The secret sauce of SUSE is that it has strong foundation and longtimers that still somehow manage to keep the spirit and attract new poeople who appreciate it in the work environment. The miracle of SUSE it's been able to survive any shitty and clueless top management it had had installed by any of the buyers. So far. Fingers crossed.

jeffbee2• 1 year ago

Why is it written as an initialism as if you would pronounce each letter individually? At least for English speakers, that's not the way, right?

johannes12343212• 1 year ago

The original name of the company was S.u.S.E. with the dots. "Software- und System-Entwicklung" (Software and system development)

Tomte5• 1 year ago

Similar: CoDeSys (Controller Development System). They also decided to leave the original meaning behind and rebranded to the all-caps CODESYS.

skrebbel2• 1 year ago

Software- und System-Entwicklung

Wow that's like naming your cleaning company "Cleaning Company"

jeffbee2• 1 year ago

Yeah but do they say "ess oo ess ee" or "suess"?

CopperWing• 1 year ago

https://youtu.be/nLdexZlVkAY?feature=shared

Deeg9rie9usi2• 1 year ago

It's [suːzə]

simmons• 1 year ago

Wow, the mention of SLS takes me back. SLS was the first Linux distribution I ever used. (Not counting the very early days of manually extracting tar archives of userspace binaries to make a system...) I remember passing around the precious shoebox of SLS floppies from person to person in high school. :)

humptybumpty• 1 year ago

Seems like it wasn’t just you: it was the first proper Linux distro in the world:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution

ashears• 1 year ago

SUSE is a strong partner for my managed products, and every person I have worked with there has been skilled and good people.

tombert5• 1 year ago

SUSE has always been this perennial figure in the Linux world for me; the Linux Distro that isn't talked about often, but is generally liked and respected, by most people who use it.

I ran OpenSUSE for about a year in 2013-2014, and it did sort of have the Just Works nature to it: things did more or less what I expected them to do without much tinkering. It was the first Linux that I liked enough to be my sole operating system instead of dual booting, which should say something by itself.

I stopped running OpenSUSE because I bought a new laptop which had Nvidia Optimus, and someone told me that that was easier to get working with Arch, so that's what I did, and I haven't really touched SUSE since, but I will always respect it for getting me interested in Linux and open source.

unyttigfjelltol• 1 year ago

I picked OpenSUSE as my personal desktop 15 years ago because its YaST confuguration module helped with administration. Same positve experience, apart from the occasional hiccup updating NVIDIA proprietary drivers.

tombert5• 1 year ago

Yeah, the reason I used OpenSUSE is that someone told me that YaST was more or less analogous to the Windows Control Panel, and that SUSE was relatively friendly for people who had mostly used Windows. I think that description is fairly accurate, I didn't really much trouble navigating around SUSE.

I'm an annoying math person now so I use NixOS for everything, and I don't really plan on leaving any time soon, but if I did SUSE would honestly still be a contender.

einpoklum3• 1 year ago

I use it at (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, at work); I never particularly liked or disliked it; but once they adopted systemd - I lost respect for it.

MrDrMcCoy3• 1 year ago

Sorry for your loss. I personally find that systemd solves real problems and makes Linux better. It has worts, but so does everything.

toprerules2• 1 year ago

100% of people who dislike systemd can't come up with a better solution that solves all of the problems that systemd was created to solve.

tombert5• 1 year ago

Everyone craps on systemd, but I have never really had an issue with it. It does the job I want it to, I think a lot of the complaints are overblown.

Either way, doesn't every major Linux distro other than Gentoo use systemd now?

Night_Thastus• 1 year ago

openSUSE is neat! If only I could actually update it from 15.4 to 15.5 without getting a Curl error. :(

sodaplayer• 1 year ago

I got a soft spot for SUSE. In the late 2000s, Novell partnered with my highschool to teach a certification class, so it became the distribution I cut my teeth on if you don't count my time playing with compiz window effects on a free Ubuntu live-disk in junior high.

adam_gyroscope• 1 year ago

SuSE doesn’t get enough credit for the quality of the distribution. Transactional updates, serious work towards a reproducible distribution, nano as an excellent container runtime, stability under large workloads - it’s a nice piece of engineering.

eitally• 1 year ago

These are some of the reasons -- besides being German, probably -- that it's one of just a couple of Linux distros certified by SAP.

hulitu• 1 year ago

SuSE doesn’t get enough credit for the quality of the distribution

Maybe now. 7.2 had a bug where they showed one unit when partitioning drives and used another one when writing to disk. Ask me how i find out.

terinjokes• 1 year ago

I think I've encountered bugs in every distro's installer from 24 years ago. Fortunately, in 86box it's less painful than I imagine you went through.

stryan• 1 year ago

nano as an excellent container runtime

Out of curiosity, are you referring to MicroOS? I know they're written some container tools like catatonit but I haven't heard of nano.

bmwiedemann2• 1 year ago

Hey, do you like reproducible builds? I'm doing some more patches this year... especially the core packages are getting in good shape now. The others have 1-2% packages with issues left.

BSDobelix5• 1 year ago

I like openSUSE, but the predictability is dirt poor (which is why I don't use it for servers...or anything else).

About two years ago, LEAP was supposed to be canned for this new shiny thing, since then...nothing. So, dear openSUSE, should I install openSUSE Leap? Wait for the "new" thing, is this "new" thing also free or what? Or you know what? I have a better idea...I just install Debian or FreeBSD (community based, no endless reselling, no corporate overlord, clear messaging).

dismalaf• 1 year ago

Kind of agree with this take. Suse was my first distro (got a box set of the commercial distro in the early 00's), but it's been unpredictable, sometimes bug laden, unclear direction, and during that time Debian has become not just better but also easier to use...

Flatpak and Flathub mean almost any distro is suitable for a home user, so now what I look for is stability and how easy it is to install and use dev tools. Everything runs and works on Debian, I've found openSuse to have more bugs.

TomMasz• 1 year ago

Wow, I haven't seen Yggdrasil mentioned in a long time. In the early 90s, one of the guys at work tried to install it on a 386 PC. They never quite succeeded. Just a couple of years later I was running SuSE at home, after having started with Red Hat. The improvement in the distributions in that short amount of time was impressive.

nezirus• 1 year ago

SuSE was my first Linux system and it helped a lot to spark my interest. Yast (software manager) and SaX (XFree86 configuration tool) were a Godsend for a noob like me in 199x.

It's still solid today, and I hold it in high regards, even if I moved to greener Linux pastures.

Propelloni• 1 year ago

I see what you did there :)

sgt• 1 year ago

YaST was pretty clunky but rock solid!

cgio• 1 year ago

My first Linux system too. Back when downloading a distro was hard with available bandwidth, I got it boxed, with quite a few manuals included in the box! Still have them somewhere alongside my copies of free x86 documentation from Intel.

Zardoz84• 1 year ago

SuSE 5.1 (only a light version that came with a magazine) and 5.3 was the first linux distro that I really liked. YaST was really great to install anything from the 6 cdroms. I have yet the copy.

vondur2• 1 year ago

I remember using the Novel SLD distro back in the day. It was really polished.

MrDrMcCoy3• 1 year ago

I honestly love OpenSUSE. About the only negative thing I can say about it is that zypper, an otherwise perfect package manager, is really, absurdly slow.

davidw• 1 year ago

The photo looks like it's an 80ies synth-pop band.

Also, "Sure, one could download all forty Slackware floppy disk images, but it would take quite a bit of time on a 28.8kbps modem"

Yes...yes it does.

On a more serious note, I miss the days when Linux and open source software where on the rise. Things weren't perfect, but there was a lot of idealism and a desire to build cool stuff and the whole "tech bro" thing wasn't what it is today.

pjmlp2• 1 year ago

After Red-Hat and Mandrake, it became my favourite home distro until Ubuntu came into the scene.

Still have the SuSE 6.3 box, like it used to be common in those days.

Yast is a great tool, and SusSE is one of the few distros that isn't stuck in the 1970's view of what means OS administration.

Also an ideal candidate for the upcoming age of siloed countries, stuck in commercial wars.

gbil• 1 year ago

6.3 was when I jumped to SuSE and yast was a revelation at the time. On the other hand I jumped away from SuSE later because of the many custom ways of doing things.

kergonath2• 1 year ago

After Red-Hat and Mandrake, it became my favourite home distro until Ubuntu came into the scene.

I fucking loved Mandrake. And Red Hat on a PowerMac. It was a challenge but it was very rewarding when it worked. I had the opposite trajectory after that, though. I tried Ubuntu when it was new and shiny but ran into so many issues… Now I have been using OpenSuse continuously for about 6 years without complaint. Even the usual (though much rarer than it used to be) sticking point of Nvidia drivers are trivial to deal with by restoring snapshots.

pjmlp2• 1 year ago

My whole story was that other than a netbook running Ubuntu, now dead, all my Linux stuff at home, are custom stuff on the router and BlueRay player that at least run Linux kernel itself, Android and WebOS powered devices, and running containers on WSL/macOS.

Mandrake was great, by its usability and being compiled for Pentiums instead of 386 CPUs.

The move to SuSE was when their development quality started to go down, and eventually pivoted into some other distro.

kjs3• 1 year ago

I used SuSE for many years as my daily driver, and it was generally a very nice ride, and I have/would recommended it to others. I got away from it a few years back because I was always hitting something I wanted to install that was "we know about Debian and Redhat...everything else you're on your own". I think I remember the last-straw was getting a video-in card and associated OSS HDTV software running...fought for a while with SuSE and Debian 'Just Worked'. If I had more time to build-from-source this probably would have been a non-issue, but if I'm going to get a new hobby building everything from source, there are probably a couple of other distros I should look at.

I should definitely revisit it...I keep running into "the Debian + Backport version of this software is just a little too out of date for what you want to do" and Ubuntu has pissed me off in other, more annoying ways too many times.

psankar• 1 year ago

I worked there for a few years during the Novell/Attachmate management. They had a strong bias towards the kernel teams and engineers. They had an european work culture and some very good leads. Their Engineers were very good. The internal mailing lists were ripe with technical discussions. Got some amazing friends and inspirational engineers with whom I would love to work again.

However, There were infighting between the GNOME and KDE desktop teams. The VPs were mostly overpaid and practically useless. The constant churn of acquisition, looking for a new buyer, etc. did not help their long term cause.

With the older system software (kernels, compilers, etc) and infra layer getting commoditized I wonder how long they may remain relevant. When they brought in a new CEO and acquired Rancher I hoped that they may recover with K8S etc, but the CEO has quit and the acquisition has not done much it seems. Until they remove some dinosaurs from the old management at VP levels, I honestly do not see any recovery for them. Thumbs up for the Engineering (and leads) and heavy thumbs down for the Management, is how I remember my time there.

BSDobelix5• 1 year ago

and heavy thumbs down for the Management, is how I remember my time there.

This is exactly what is reflected to the public with their flappy and sloppy unpredictability of product lines (openSUSE that is).

LEAP is beta/rc for Enterprise -> LEAP is now based ON Enterprise -> LEAP will be canned for NEW thing just Tumbleweed for community in the future -> Nothing about new thing but new LEAP are still published -> Community still wants something like LEAP, creates Slow-roll Tumbleweed in fear of SUSE still canning LEAP...maybe? -> Now, no news about EOL of LEAP, no "new thing", but Slow-Roll for Tumbleweed...what a Clown-show...

SUSE/openSUSE you are terrible in messaging, like chickens on meth with a new brain-fart every two month.

Nothing against the Dev's but the C-suite and Marketing should probably be replaced, those ping-pong announcements is the opposite from what someone wants from a Distro.

Really openSUSE why should anyone use LEAP for a professional project if there is a really big chance that in 3-4 years a complete re-installation/migration is needed? Or is it not? I don't know, also pretty sure you don't know too. So fck it i use Debian/Ubuntu/FreeBSD or Slackware hell even Oracle-Linux, literary anything else is more predictable longterm.

You guys have no technical problems but a trust and communication one.

musicale• 1 year ago

However, There were infighting between the GNOME and KDE desktop teams

I like to imagine an alternate world where KDE won, became the de facto standard Linux desktop environment, and was refined to perfection (along with a huge set of desktop apps with a consistent user interface design).

rickspencer3• 1 year ago

Son of a gun! I've been working at SUSE for a bit of a year, and a lot of the positive things people say here still ring true, at least to me.

dark-star• 1 year ago

One thing I always found awesome is that even the very first versions, like "Linux Aktuell 4.x" from 1996 or so, already had full support for Braille terminals during installation.

That made SuSE very usable for blind people, even installable, while for other operating systems you always needed someone to set the system up for you (and probably still do).

I am not blind personally (and I don't know anybody who is), but I still found that a fascinating thing to do (I assume they knew someone who was blind and required that support?)

bkaindl• 1 year ago

I was working at S.u.S.E. at the time (in 1998) and there was a guy (I think he was an employee, but I might be wrong) on site who was blind, he and made sure the Braille terminals worked; yes I think also during installation.

patwolf• 1 year ago

I was always blown away by the fact that YaST could run either as a GTK app or a CLI/ncurses tool. The same config was available in both.

Back when I was using SuSE regularly, I was developing a pluggable web-based admin tool. I always wanted to look at the way YaST was written to see if I could do something similar for creating a web UI, but my project got sidelined before I got very far.

bmwiedemann2• 1 year ago

This GUI abstraction can be found in https://github.com/libyui/libyui and usage examples in https://github.com/yast/

It has backends for ncurses, gtk and qt with some theming support.

albertzeyer• 1 year ago

I think this was my first (or among my first) Linux distributions, around 2000 or so. I did not had Internet access back then. I had some coding experience (mostly Basic; I was just learning C++). I made a dual installation with Windows. I don't really remember the details anymore, but I struggled with really using it, and after I played around with it (maybe it lead to some system freeze and then I did a cold restart), at some point it would not boot anymore. But also, I was not really learning anything about how it works, and did not really understand too much. I think I also tried Red Hat later but had similar experience.

Then some time later, I got Internet access, and I read about Gentoo, and the tutorial to install it from scratch was really well written and easy to follow, and that helped me really a lot in understanding how Linux really works, what components are involved in the whole system. I continued using that for many years. Whenever there was some problem, I was able to understand it and fix it.

Nowadays, I just want to use sth which is so widespread that it is very well supported, and I can expect that any problem can be found on the Internet with some solution, and sth where I just need to spend only a minimal amount of effort to keep it running and up-to-date, so I chose Ubuntu (already couple of years ago; not sure if my choice today would be the same, but for now I stick to it). So this is sth which basically just works. But I wonder, for a newcomer who really wants to understand how Linux works, I think I would rather recommend Gentoo or Arch Linux or so. I think I also prefer the rolling release concept (Arch, Gentoo) over the point release development model (Ubuntu, Debian, Suse, Slackware, etc).

e40• 1 year ago

One thing not made clear in that history was their role in ARM Linux. There was a guy there, I forget his name (I think it was Andy). We learned a lot about making an ARM compiler for CL from him. He really was the, at the low level, the one that help make ARM Linux happen.

Anyone remember his name? Definitely would like to give him a shout out.

It might have been Andreas Färber.

Cockbrand• 1 year ago

And then there was /usr/bin/zast as a symlink pointing to /usr/bin/yast - just in case you had a DIN keyboard, but the matching keymap hadn’t been loaded.

tacerus• 1 year ago

We still ship a symlink `/usr/bin/yzpper` => `/usr/bin/zypper` by default. ;-)

peter_retief• 1 year ago

Wow that brings back memories!

tuananh• 1 year ago

SUSE is not very popular in southeast-east asia I suppose. for corp here (at least in my country), the defacto OS for enterprise is RedHat. Never once I heard SUSE was considered.

The History of S.u.S.E

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