upvote
The point being someone is left holding the bag?

That's potentially true, but not necessarily. I haven't looked into this particular case, however it's entirely possible that a lot of the EU have started divesting from Windows and into suse, which has caused a big spike in revenue here.

Or its PE doing PE things and it's all a farce.

reply
Nobody uses SuseLinux any more. If SUSE gets 6 billion dollars and a private equity firm gets nothing valuable, there's nothing wrong with that.
reply
> Nobody uses SuseLinux any more.

What gives you that impression? They had $700MM in revenue in 2022 and many HPC clusters run on Cray OS[1] (which is SLES).

> If SUSE gets 6 billion dollars

Not how sales work.

[1]: https://top500.org/statistics/list/

reply
By "nobody" I presume you mean you and your friends? From the article;

>> "More than 60% of the Fortune 500 rely on SUSE to power some of their workloads, according to the company."

This is an Enterprise version of Linux, and unless you are in the enterprise space you're unlikely to come across it.

Also from the article; >> "The company generates about $800 million in revenue "

So again, this suggests that people are indeed using it.

reply
Rancher/k3s is used a lot in many places as well.
reply
There’s also harvester on top of rancher. It’s one of the very few open source competitors to RedHats OpenShift that I’m aware of.

I mostly like their use of an immutable OS as base layer for the virtualization - despite the limitations it sometimes has.

reply
Harvester is just Kubevirt with some UI atop it, the same as Redhat Virt. Works fine if you’re hosting datacenters or whatever, haven’t seen it be suitable in smaller manufacturing environment
reply
Over 60% are SUSE?! Sorry, but I’m with everyone else…

I remember since the start that SUSE was more popular in Europe, but no way would that be the case in the US. If anything, I’d be willing to put my money on > 60% of Linux installs being RHEL/Centos rather than SUSE

reply
You could get the number wrong. The quote stated that 60% of the companies use Suse to power some of the workloads. So if most of these companies would use Suse to host SAP, some have a few teams using Rancher and some (more so in Europe ) are using Sles you still get to these numbers even if most of them use RedHat for most of their workloads.
reply
Why would they lie? Hacker News simply has this bizarre blind spot about what Fortune 500 companies do and what computers are that run Linux. One of their biggest customers is Chick-fil-a using k3s for the their point-of-sale network. I'm sure there are approximately zero employees interacting with the system that realize that, but it's still there.

Also, from my own experience, SUSE used to have nearly all of the US geointelligence processing because of the HPC connection mentioned elsewhere with CrayOS, but that went away when DNI forced everyone onto the CIA's private AWS service, which only had RHEL AMIs available. The national labs and more niche intelligence processing that can't run in the kinds of machines AWS provides still make heavy use of it.

reply
SuSE is about the 2nd most used distro in the enterprise, and I can understand why.
reply
I've been using OpenSUSE on my home PC for the past 3 years - it is a really solid Linux distribution and I rarely had any problems.
reply
Interesting. It's the only commercial distro I could ever stomach, in fact I really like it but don't use it, (because there's a non-commercial distro that I like much more). (Edit: my point was that it would feel like a real loss if it were to deteriorate)
reply
It's still quite popular with SAP shops here in Europe at least. And I could imagine that the strong anti-American sentiment in Europe plays in its favor.
reply
Yep. The majority of the worlds SAP-installations use SUSE somewhere in the stack. As for the desktop, opensuse is rock solid. I've used it for years without any problems. I've had colleagues who use Ubuntu and they always have glitches and hiccups.
reply
Maybe for your personal workstation this might be the experience you have. But from my experience for enterprise there is RHEL, Suse and maybe Ubuntu Pro. If you are an AWS Enterprise customer you might justify Amazon Linux
reply