What's left of SuSE? [LWN.net]

What's left of SuSE?

Posted May 12, 2025 15:23 UTC (Mon) by troglobit (guest, #39178)
Parent article: The last of YaST?

To most of us, "growing up" with Linux from the early 90's to now, YaST was SuSE. If they move to (admittedly great) tooling like Cockpit but which is not under their control, what's preventing them from becoming another RedHat/Fedora follower rather than having an edge of their own? Sure, it could be labeled "the RedHat of Europe", and in the times we're right now that may be a good selling point on its own, but still ... what's the remaining added value of (open)SuSE compared to (fedora)RedHat?

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What's left of SuSE?

Posted May 12, 2025 15:41 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

That's me. I've always been a SuSE fan, never got on with RedHat.

And SuSE always used to be KDE. That went a while back ... now YaST ... without a USP I suspect SUSE will struggle. Maybe they're struggling now, and that's why they're doing it, but there's plans for survival, and there's thrashing and drowning. Let's hope it's not the latter!

Cheers,
Wol

What's left of SuSE?

Posted May 15, 2025 9:35 UTC (Thu) by tvannahl (guest, #134292) [Link]

For the past years I've been fully immersed in the Fedora Family (Silverblue, Fedora CoreOS, CentOS, CentOS Stream, RHEL) and I've never considered anything outside of it due to SELinux.

Recent developments and uncertainties in the Fedora family (CentOS burried, Successor unclear, OKD vs OpenShift) have sparked more interest into other distributions. Given SuSE has been picking up SELinux (finally), having an atomic OS strategy and now with the deprecation of YaST (my personal anti selling point) it is starting to sound more interesting to me.

What's left of SuSE?

Posted May 14, 2025 15:15 UTC (Wed) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link]

Isn’t the current CEO of SuSE an ex Red Hat guy? He may be quite happy with a label like “The Red Hat of Europe”.

Honestly, with the current level of concern around US controlled organizations, “The Red Hat of Europe” may actually be a pretty successful shadow branding strategy.

With initiatives like Liberty Linux and OpenELA, a key part of SuSE’s plan is clearly to win over RHEL customers by letting them move to SuSE support while still retaining Red Hat software. If they want those customers to eventually migrate to SLE, reducing the impedance mismatch between the two offerings may actually make sense.

I remember when Steve Jobs rejoined Apple in 1997. They were almost bankrupt. He was immediately criticized for killing of key technologies like OpenDoc that set Apple apart. Then he brought Apple closer to Microsoft to the dismay of the faithful (even adopting Internet Explorer). Then Apple became the most valuable company in the world.

I am not predicting that future for SuSE. I really do not know much about them really. But sometimes these kinds of moves pay-off.

What's left of SuSE?

Posted May 15, 2025 10:34 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (6 responses)

> To most of us, "growing up" with Linux from the early 90's to now, YaST was SuSE. If they move to (admittedly great) tooling like Cockpit but which is not under their control, what's preventing them from becoming another RedHat/Fedora follower rather than having an edge of their own?

The notion that there must be distro specific tools in order to be unique seems misguided to me and they don't really loose any control by moving to Cockpit. It's been so many years since I have seen anyone mention YaST as the reason to use SuSE. If later on they disagree they can always fork it or go in a different direction at any point same as they did with their own installer which was originally Cockpit based as well.

IIRC when OpenSUSE was launched originally, they just mass imported Fedora's packaging guidelines at one point but they are obviously not the same distro today. As an example, Fedora's Atomic OS relied on ostree and has moved towards bootc now. SuSE seems to be betting more on just use Btrfs filesystem snapshots. You can take non unique tools and configure it quite differently to have very different results if you wanted to but I am glad more distros are consolidating around using more of the same foundational tools. I hope at some point they use the same package manager and so forth. If anything the common tooling likely helps them win over some customers because of the ease of transition even in the enterprise space where they compete on support and services value instead of lock-in.

What's left of SuSE?

Posted May 15, 2025 21:16 UTC (Thu) by sionescu (subscriber, #59410) [Link] (4 responses)

> It's been so many years since I have seen anyone mention YaST as the reason to use SuSE.

You should talk more to the users. If you go on forums (reddit, etc...) you'll notice that Yast is still a major selling point.

What's left of SuSE?

Posted May 15, 2025 21:26 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (3 responses)

> You should talk more to the users. If you go on forums (reddit, etc...) you'll notice that Yast is still a major selling point.

Talking to users is how I got the subjective impression I already have, more isn't helpful there. It would be much more useful if there is a survey of the users to see if Yast remains a major selling point. If it is, why hasn't anyone stepped up to help maintain it? Is it because Ruby is no longer as popular?

What's left of SuSE?

Posted May 16, 2025 6:28 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

> If it is, why hasn't anyone stepped up to help maintain it?

Because users aren't programmers? That is the fundamental problem with Open Source - the assumption that users can fix their own problems. When users and programmers were the same people, when the tools/problems were stuff programmers used in their daily life, that was true.

Now that linux has spread far and wide (and some of us want to spread it even wider), the idea that users have the skills and/or desire to fix their own problems is laughable. If YaST broke for me, I wouldn't have a clue where to start, and I've been a DP guy my entire career ...

I use YaST because it's easy to use, I'm familiar with it, and if there were any problems I wouldn't have a clue how to fix it ...

I use gentoo because it forces me to learn things I wouldn't have a clue about.

If SuSE drops YaST, I don't know what I'd replace (SUSE) with. I don't like RH, I don't like Debian-based systems, gentoo is too complicated to support for other people - what else is there?

Cheers,
Wol

What's left of SuSE?

Posted May 16, 2025 12:58 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

> Because users aren't programmers?

Wasn't talking about users, projects like openSUSE has other non SUSE contributors but also users include programmers in any substantial Linux community. If a project is that popular as has been asserted, other people step up to maintain it. This happens all the time.

What's left of SuSE?

Posted May 26, 2025 0:37 UTC (Mon) by jjs (guest, #10315) [Link]

Users can either fix & improve things themselves, or PAY SOMEONE to make changes they desire (not necessarily the main developer). Due to the freedoms granted by F/LOSS licenses, you're not limited to maintenance & improvement by the developer (like in closed source - only Microsoft can work on Microsoft proprietary apps, only IBM can work on IBM Proprietary apps, etc.).

In fact, back when I was more involved in the advocacy side of things, I recommended that companies using F/LOSS set aside 10-50% of what they were spending on licensing to spend on desired bug fixes & improvements of the software. If the main developers weren't interested, or too overloaded with other work (sorry, your bug is #2,000 on our priority list, we're still working on the first 50 bugs), they could pay someone else to make the changes. They could then donate that back to the project to get it incorporated & not have to maintain out of tree changes.

What's left of SuSE?

Posted Jul 16, 2025 8:25 UTC (Wed) by DeMus (guest, #178252) [Link]

"It's been so many years since I have seen anyone mention YaST as the reason to use SuSE."

That is probably true, I can't confirm that. But for me, when I installed openSUSE Tumbleweed years ago, after the first boot I did an upgrade/update and after the second (re)boot I opened Yast and on the opening screen I would start at the top left module and work my way down, row by row to see if I needed to change a setting, add something, or whatever. In a very short time I would have finished doing that and knew I did not forget something, meaning in a short time I did a complete setup which worked fantastic. I, like probably many others did not mention that anywhere.
I have wondered so many times why no other distro would either use Yast or create its own implementation of it. Yes, nowadays there are a few other distro's who have something which, when you look at those programs with your eyes closed, look a bit like Yast.

After having used Fedora's immutable distro Kinoite and later on Ublue's Aurora I am now working my way towards a new period of having an openSUSE distro on my laptop and because of the immutable versions I have used in the past 1-1/2 years I now would like to start using Kalpa. A Yast would be very welcome there.