Laser , 8 days ago

I think the issue with Suse is a lack of clear vision - SLE exists and it’s very good to have a competitor to Red Hat in my opinion. OpenSuse is a bit of everything: there’s Tumbleweed which’s selling point is to be rolling release and fulfilled the role Sid has for Debian: be the basis for the stable distribution. However, the stable distribution which was rebranded to Leap is now based on SLE (and will be based on ALP with version 16 if everything works out). So Tumbleweed is just rolling along as a downstream of Factory, which is… another rolling distribution serving as the main development distribution.

Then there’s also Micro OS, another rolling release distribution designed to host containers. Personally, I’d have found a minimal OS designed to be run in a VM - something similar to Alpine - more useful, but I’m not really a container guy. It’s also supposed to switch to ALP if I’m not mistaken.

Oh yeah and there’s also OpenEuler which is a free RHEL clone.

I wonder if all of this makes sense in some enterprise setups?

And then, last time I tried Tumbleweed (in fairness this was some years ago), after all this work with distributions tailored to specific cases, a build system with testing and so on, I run into a network configuration issue that couldn’t be solved with YaST. I didn’t know why they insist on keeping it, I guess at this point it’s such cost fallacy. Anyhow, try searching for how to solve it with Suse, answers are usually use YaST. Turns out Suse uses their own solution for networking, which is wicked (that’s not an adjective). This is started in 13.4.1.1 in doc.opensuse.org/…/cha-network.html. I don’t remember seeing the option in the terminal YaST. Zypper also wasn’t very convincing, coming from pacman.

All in all, from my point of view, they created a broad ecosystem that fills a lot of niches and yet just annoys me when I actually try to use it. In my opinion, their core tools are unremarkable at best.