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

What's left of SuSE?

Posted May 15, 2025 21:16 UTC (Thu) by sionescu (subscriber, #59410)
In reply to: What's left of SuSE? by rahulsundaram
Parent article: The last of YaST?

> 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.

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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.