This whole thing of private equity + companies getting massively inflated - only ends one way, it might not be this this buyer but one down the line, but there is something deeply wrong with the whole model, the one that starts with startups such as those funded by ycombinator.
That's potentially true, but not necessarily. I haven't looked into this particular case, however it's entirely possible that a lot of the EU have started divesting from Windows and into suse, which has caused a big spike in revenue here.
Harvester is just Kubevirt with some UI atop it, the same as Redhat Virt. Works fine if you’re hosting datacenters or whatever, haven’t seen it be suitable in smaller manufacturing environment
Over 60% are SUSE?! Sorry, but I’m with everyone else…
I remember since the start that SUSE was more popular in Europe, but no way would that be the case in the US. If anything, I’d be willing to put my money on > 60% of Linux installs being RHEL/Centos rather than SUSE
You could get the number wrong. The quote stated that 60% of the companies use Suse to power some of the workloads. So if most of these companies would use Suse to host SAP, some have a few teams using Rancher and some (more so in Europe ) are using Sles you still get to these numbers even if most of them use RedHat for most of their workloads.
Why would they lie? Hacker News simply has this bizarre blind spot about what Fortune 500 companies do and what computers are that run Linux. One of their biggest customers is Chick-fil-a using k3s for the their point-of-sale network. I'm sure there are approximately zero employees interacting with the system that realize that, but it's still there.
Also, from my own experience, SUSE used to have nearly all of the US geointelligence processing because of the HPC connection mentioned elsewhere with CrayOS, but that went away when DNI forced everyone onto the CIA's private AWS service, which only had RHEL AMIs available. The national labs and more niche intelligence processing that can't run in the kinds of machines AWS provides still make heavy use of it.
Interesting. It's the only commercial distro I could ever stomach, in fact I really like it but don't use it, (because there's a non-commercial distro that I like much more). (Edit: my point was that it would feel like a real loss if it were to deteriorate)
Maybe for your personal workstation this might be the experience you have.
But from my experience for enterprise there is RHEL, Suse and maybe Ubuntu Pro.
If you are an AWS Enterprise customer you might justify Amazon Linux
Also Oracle Linux and CIQ's version of Rocky, albeit in rather different niches.
I think Ubuntu Pro is more common in service providers that sell to enterprises rather than in enterprises themselves. It enables them to say "yes, we comply with all of these box-ticking standards that you require your vendors to have!" without bringing in much of the rest of the enterprise baggage.
SuSE is used more heavily than any of them - as others have said, they're used more or less everywhere where SAP is to be found, and they're very strong in the HPC space too.
It's still quite popular with SAP shops here in Europe at least. And I could imagine that the strong anti-American sentiment in Europe plays in its favor.
Yep. The majority of the worlds SAP-installations use SUSE somewhere in the stack. As for the desktop, opensuse is rock solid. I've used it for years without any problems. I've had colleagues who use Ubuntu and they always have glitches and hiccups.
They own Rancher and Harvester. My brother, this is a good enough reason for someone to pick it up. There’s no better way to kill any serious sovereign cloud attempt than that.
If they are sold, which I think it would be a good thing, I hope a competent organization. But these days, it will probably be another Private Equity Company that will force it to go all in on AI, eventually ruining SUSE :(
Only if the buyer is an-EU company. If it gets picked up by a non-EU entity, it will most likely end up being a stick in the rear wheel of the sovereign cloud bike.
What does ‘enterprise Linux’ actually mean? Not asking snarkily; I’m curious what the main differences are between this and other Linux distros. Is it mostly about getting good tech support?
Yeah it's about support contracts, which covers a lot of services actually such as maintaining security audited package repositories. But most importantly it's about support life cycles you can rely on for a long term investment of time and infrastructure outlays.
For example, RHEL 10 has a planned support phase out until 2035, with extended support available until 2038.
They do tend to have a different goal for their intial installation and configuration to consumer distros, with a focus on security and providing tools you will need in an enterprise hosting environment.
If you have more than a 100 linux machines you certainly need someone who knows linux to support them. You can either hire a team to do this or hire someone who will manage a support contract with suse/ubuntu/red hat etc.
This whole thing of private equity + companies getting massively inflated - only ends one way, it might not be this this buyer but one down the line, but there is something deeply wrong with the whole model, the one that starts with startups such as those funded by ycombinator.
The point being someone is left holding the bag?
That's potentially true, but not necessarily. I haven't looked into this particular case, however it's entirely possible that a lot of the EU have started divesting from Windows and into suse, which has caused a big spike in revenue here.
Or its PE doing PE things and it's all a farce.
maybe they are just IPOing it and selling it to the public?
Nobody uses SuseLinux any more. If SUSE gets 6 billion dollars and a private equity firm gets nothing valuable, there's nothing wrong with that.
> Nobody uses SuseLinux any more.
What gives you that impression? They had $700MM in revenue in 2022 and many HPC clusters run on Cray OS[1] (which is SLES).
> If SUSE gets 6 billion dollars
Not how sales work.
[1]: https://top500.org/statistics/list/
By "nobody" I presume you mean you and your friends? From the article;
>> "More than 60% of the Fortune 500 rely on SUSE to power some of their workloads, according to the company."
This is an Enterprise version of Linux, and unless you are in the enterprise space you're unlikely to come across it.
Also from the article; >> "The company generates about $800 million in revenue "
So again, this suggests that people are indeed using it.
Rancher/k3s is used a lot in many places as well.
There’s also harvester on top of rancher. It’s one of the very few open source competitors to RedHats OpenShift that I’m aware of.
I mostly like their use of an immutable OS as base layer for the virtualization - despite the limitations it sometimes has.
Harvester is just Kubevirt with some UI atop it, the same as Redhat Virt. Works fine if you’re hosting datacenters or whatever, haven’t seen it be suitable in smaller manufacturing environment
It fundamentally is rke2+rancher+kubevirt, but there’s a lot of packaging around it to make that work.
True, I am underselling it.
I liked it when I used it, but it wasn’t really a fit for our environment from what i’ve seen.
Over 60% are SUSE?! Sorry, but I’m with everyone else…
I remember since the start that SUSE was more popular in Europe, but no way would that be the case in the US. If anything, I’d be willing to put my money on > 60% of Linux installs being RHEL/Centos rather than SUSE
You could get the number wrong. The quote stated that 60% of the companies use Suse to power some of the workloads. So if most of these companies would use Suse to host SAP, some have a few teams using Rancher and some (more so in Europe ) are using Sles you still get to these numbers even if most of them use RedHat for most of their workloads.
Why would they lie? Hacker News simply has this bizarre blind spot about what Fortune 500 companies do and what computers are that run Linux. One of their biggest customers is Chick-fil-a using k3s for the their point-of-sale network. I'm sure there are approximately zero employees interacting with the system that realize that, but it's still there.
Also, from my own experience, SUSE used to have nearly all of the US geointelligence processing because of the HPC connection mentioned elsewhere with CrayOS, but that went away when DNI forced everyone onto the CIA's private AWS service, which only had RHEL AMIs available. The national labs and more niche intelligence processing that can't run in the kinds of machines AWS provides still make heavy use of it.
Interesting. It's the only commercial distro I could ever stomach, in fact I really like it but don't use it, (because there's a non-commercial distro that I like much more). (Edit: my point was that it would feel like a real loss if it were to deteriorate)
SuSE is about the 2nd most used distro in the enterprise, and I can understand why.
Maybe for your personal workstation this might be the experience you have. But from my experience for enterprise there is RHEL, Suse and maybe Ubuntu Pro. If you are an AWS Enterprise customer you might justify Amazon Linux
Also Oracle Linux and CIQ's version of Rocky, albeit in rather different niches.
I think Ubuntu Pro is more common in service providers that sell to enterprises rather than in enterprises themselves. It enables them to say "yes, we comply with all of these box-ticking standards that you require your vendors to have!" without bringing in much of the rest of the enterprise baggage.
SuSE is used more heavily than any of them - as others have said, they're used more or less everywhere where SAP is to be found, and they're very strong in the HPC space too.
It's still quite popular with SAP shops here in Europe at least. And I could imagine that the strong anti-American sentiment in Europe plays in its favor.
Yep. The majority of the worlds SAP-installations use SUSE somewhere in the stack. As for the desktop, opensuse is rock solid. I've used it for years without any problems. I've had colleagues who use Ubuntu and they always have glitches and hiccups.
I've been using OpenSUSE on my home PC for the past 3 years - it is a really solid Linux distribution and I rarely had any problems.
They own Rancher and Harvester. My brother, this is a good enough reason for someone to pick it up. There’s no better way to kill any serious sovereign cloud attempt than that.
TIL SuSE does $800m revenue per year
SUSE made some interesting hiring moves lately, I am not surprised they are gearing up for a sale or major investment.
If they are sold, which I think it would be a good thing, I hope a competent organization. But these days, it will probably be another Private Equity Company that will force it to go all in on AI, eventually ruining SUSE :(
> which I think it would be a good thing
Only if the buyer is an-EU company. If it gets picked up by a non-EU entity, it will most likely end up being a stick in the rear wheel of the sovereign cloud bike.
What does ‘enterprise Linux’ actually mean? Not asking snarkily; I’m curious what the main differences are between this and other Linux distros. Is it mostly about getting good tech support?
Yeah it's about support contracts, which covers a lot of services actually such as maintaining security audited package repositories. But most importantly it's about support life cycles you can rely on for a long term investment of time and infrastructure outlays.
For example, RHEL 10 has a planned support phase out until 2035, with extended support available until 2038.
They do tend to have a different goal for their intial installation and configuration to consumer distros, with a focus on security and providing tools you will need in an enterprise hosting environment.
> For example, RHEL 10 has a planned support phase out until 2035, with extended support available until 2038.
I wonder if that's 19 Jan 2038. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
RHEL 10 lacks 32-bit x86 packages, so it goes past that date. RHEL 9 support ends before that date.
Support, especially for older releases (which is important for heavily regulated companies that can't upgrade on a dime).
More heavily vetted (i.e. older) kernel and support for every package in their repository.
Guaranteed security hotfixes with some time guarantees.
Training and certification programs.
SLAs, support, LTS services etc...
If you have more than a 100 linux machines you certainly need someone who knows linux to support them. You can either hire a team to do this or hire someone who will manage a support contract with suse/ubuntu/red hat etc.
Another potential L for EU software sovereignty. Let's see if Brussels lets this pass.
Color me shocked that SUSE was worth 6 billion. Good for them.
[dead]