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.
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.
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 :-/
+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 ...
Definitely better than me asking help to install some pre-1.0 KDE beta in an IRC channel somewhere in the 90's. Some helpful hacker asked me to give them the root access so they could install KDE for me. I guess that's how I learned about not trusting everybody...
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.
Yep. They used to be premium in the 90s and even early 2000s. I remember how you were special if you had a CD burner on your computer instead of a regular CD Player :). Kinda like difference between a VCP and VCR for even older kids.
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)
Oh that's so true, i started with 7.2 or .1, but never worked well, so i switched to mandrake, then a ~decade Debian, and now back (about 2years ago) to OpenSuse Leap (but with XFS as / and just on the laptop) everything else FreeBSD.
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.
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
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Bohlingen? I have never heard about such an IBM location.
Maybe you meant Böblingen. That used to be a big research and development site since the days of punched cards until its shutdown was announced 2 years ago. They did a lot of zSystem stuff, no idea whether anything with SUSE.
Disclaimer: I was a trainee at another IBM research site long before Linux was invented. So I cannot reveal any internals about the topic.
What I meant was that it was really all about SUSE originally. Red Hat came later and AFAIK Ubuntu has never really been a material presence on IBM mainframes. No one else has ever mattered with respect to commercial Linux distributions that would run on a mainframe.
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.
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/
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.
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...
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.
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.
I don’t think MicroFocus is really organized around integration..it’s more of a PE/holding company like Vista (?imo). The problem remains that they bought the entirety of HP’s software portfolio and transformed it to a declining legacy market valuation. I would not be surprised if a Vertica IPO would raise more than MicroFocus market capitalization (~$2B) and debt ($4B) combined...sort of like SUSE in this case. AWS deal should help, but in reality the mix of holdings doesn’t make sense to me and several of their properties would make more sense standing alone.
Don't forget they also hold the copyright to UNIX[1]. They're doing absolutely nothing with it, presumably other than collecting royalties from Xinuos.
The whole business of Novell retaining the copyrights to UNIX when they transferred other rights to SCO may have been the most weird twist of a generally surreal case.
I wonder if we'll ever really know the whole backstory here. SCO pretty clearly messed up big time but did their lawyers just screw up or did SCO decide this was a detail to be dealt with later?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I believe their Linux desktops are Debian-based but my understanding is their servers run a highly customized version of Linux that really isn't based on and doesn't look like a conventional distro.
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
as someone who supports and uses Debian daily, the poverty problems in the ecosystem get to be dreary sometimes. This SUSE. warts and bruises included, is a distro that wants to do business, for you know, money. In the West, we need companies to find a middle ground.
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.
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.
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.
