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.

A relatively recent development, but OpenSUSE is shaping up to be one of the preferred distros for automotive embedded linux applications.

Aha. Perhaps they have some kind of collaboration with Porsche/Volkswagen or Opel...?

Not sure about those OEMs, but Daimler definitely is working with them. These German brands really really like to use German software

"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.)

kubeadm is in the repo for years meanwhile.

> Does anyone have any anecdata where they've seen it most heavily used?

Continental European enterprises.

Yep. SAP utilizes it, for instance.

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.

Not that I've used it in several years, but Teradata and AsterData used to run on SUSE. It was extremely stable in my experience.

Both definitely still did as of the end of October when I worked at Teradata.

I've seen in a few datacenters in Europe. At the end companies decide based on license and support more than tech.

openSUSE is my daily OS, mostly because the Packman repository is so comprehensive.

A lot of the mainframes out there are running SUSE. SUSE for S/390.

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.

I'm sure you're right which is why I couldn't confirm it on Google.

Example: https://newsroom.ibm.com/Bringing-Linux-to-IBM-Z This is very politically partner-agnostic but a lot of the work was specifically around SUSE in the early days.

>This is very politically partner-agnostic

Not really. Redhat and SUSE get named explicitly.

Edit: Ubuntu, too.

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.

I still see many banks using it. I think in the future they will end up using Redhat, but until now, I still didn't see it happening.