SuSE/openSuSE is innovating plenty of stuff which other distros find it worth to immitate, e.g. CachyOS and omarchy as Arch-derivatives felt that openSuSE-style btrfs snapshots were pretty cool.
It's a rock-solid distro, and if I had a use for enterprise support, I'd probably look into SLES as a pretty serious contender.
The breadth of what they're doing seems unparalleled, i.e. they have rolling release (Tumbleweed), delayed rolling release (Slowroll) which is pretty unique in and of itself, point release (Leap), and then both Tumbleweed and Leap are available in immutable form as well (MicroOS, and Leap Micro respectively), and all of the aforementioned with a broad choice of desktops or as server-focused minimal environments with an impressively small footprint without making unreasonable tradeoffs. ...if you multiply out all of those choices it gives you, it turns into quite a hairy ball of combinatorics, but they're doing a decent job supporting it all.
As far as graphical tools for system administration go, YaST is one of the most powerful and they are currently investing in properly replacing it, now that its 20-year history makes for an out-of-date appearance. I tried their new Agama installer just today, and was very pleased with the direction they're taking.
...so, not quite sure what you're getting at with your "Back in the day..." I, too, remember the days of going to a brick-and-mortar store to buy Linux as a box set, and it was between RedHat and SuSE. Since then, I think they've lost mindshare because other options became numerous and turned up the loudness, but I think they've been quiety doing a pretty decent job all this time and are still beloved by those who care to pay attention.
SUSE has a lot of ex-Red Hatters at high levels these days. Their CEO ran Asia-Pacific for a long time and North America commercial sales for a shorter period.
SUSE has always been pretty big in Europe but never was that prominent in North America except for IBM mainframes, which Red Hat chipped away at over time. (For a period, SUSE supported some mainframe features that Red Hat didn't--probably in part because some Red Hat engineering leadership was at least privately dismissive of the whole idea of running Linux on mainframes.)
Always reminds me of the quote "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." by T. J. Watson Sr.
The quote is usually delivered as a punchline of sorts, but we're rapidly approaching a world where there truly will be only five computers. If you define a computer as a system capable of truly general purpose computing, and if you count the computers as systems each capable of operating truly independently of the others. The term "general purpose" needs the further qualification, that a great deal of power and political capital will be needed to have any say in what purpose one of these five computers will be put to, and it will then be forced on the other people who are forced to work with that computer.
The E.U. making life difficult for U.S.-based monopolists, and the U.S. making life difficult for E.U.-based monopolists? For a net effect of life being difficult for all monopolists?
Well, that sounds like a wonderful idea!
I am all for it. Through this model, we might actually enjoy effective antitrust enforcement, and escape regulatory capture! Who would have thought that this day would ever come? Once again, it turns out I have been too cynical all my life.
"effective antitrust enforcement, and escape regulatory capture"
Give me an example where Antitrust was actually breaking any monopoly.
In the EU and the Microsoft antitrust case, the remedy was to give the best poison to the competitors (free software Samba in that case) in that case royalties over patents.
Antitrust don't work, fines are too low, remedies are not working, and the administration is biased and politicized.
> The E.U. making life difficult for U.S.-based monopolists, and the U.S. making life difficult for E.U.-based monopolists? For a net effect of life being difficult for all monopolists?
Its not only for monopolists. The first victims of regulatory moat-building are always small businesses and individuals.They cant pay the fines.
I wouldn't do a take-home unless they do an interview first, to signal they value my time and are acting in good faith. (HR people don't count).
Then, when they give me the take-home, I would ask how many other people are in the stage with me. If it's 20, with only one candidate getting hired, forget it. My expectation in such situations would be that they won't be able to trim the pipeline as much as they will need/want to by applying purely objective/rational criteria, and I'd end up getting rejected on grounds of "inability to mind-read subjective preferences".
Is the Mac Pro pretty much no longer a thing, going forward? -- Not trying to be a smartass, just asking out of genuine curiosity, because I know next to nothing about the Apple lineup. But the naming ("M2" vs "M5") would seem to suggest it's 3 generations behind the latest?
Yes, it mostly exists for people who absolutely require PCI slots, except you can’t use AMD/Nvidia GPUs anymore so the utility of that is limited.
Apple has their “Afterburner” card for ProRes media encoding, you could add even more ports, or there’s probably weird AV interface cards, but the vast majority of people can save a few thousand dollars and get a Mac Studio instead.
Since the Mac Studio has more than 10 customers it gets updated more frequently.
There were rumors about the Mac Pro getting a higher tier of “we stuck twice as many cores together in the SoC” but it didn’t pan out, likely not worth the development time compared to the higher volume products. But it could hypothetically still happen.
the next mac pro (presumably next mar/apr) is the first that comes a full 3-year product cycle after ai hype started.
therefore I expect that mac pro (and in similar vein mac studio) will be repositioned as ai/ml dev machine, with apple leaning into their lucky strike of UMA fit with modern requirements.
my bet is m5 extreme exclusive to mac pro and 1 tb possibly even 2 tb ram, and mac studio limited to m5 ultra and 1 tb ram on the high ends.
but thats not based on rumors or "news" of any sort, just from logic extrapolated if i were in apple shoes
CachyOS and openSUSE have you covered with btrfs and snapper pre-configured to take snapshots before/after doing potentially damaging things (and, of course, you can make them manually, whenever the thought occurs to you that you're entering the "danger zone"). You can boot into a snapshot directly from the boatloader, then rollback if you need to.
Immutable distros just one-up that by trying to steer the system in a direction where it can work with a readonly rootfs in normal operation, and nudging you to take a snapshot before/after taking the rootfs from readonly to read-write. (openSUSE has you covered there as well, if that's your thing; it's called MicroOS).
Both of those distros use KDE by default, so the value-add of KDE having its own distribution is basically so they can have a "reference implementation" that will always have all the latest and greatest that KDE has to offer, and showcase to the rest of the Linux world, how they envision the integration should be done.
If I were to set up a library computer or a computer for my aging parents, I would choose openSUSE Leap Micro with KDE, as that would put the emphasis on stability instead.
The problem IMO is politics, not nationalism (which only enters into the politics indirectly). European integration is a half-done project. Political forces that want to finish the job get cancelled out by political forces that want to undo the progress we've already made with the net effect of nothing getting done in any direction, maintaining a status-quo that pretty much nobody wants, and nobody (nationalist or otherwise) ever wanted. And that status quo is that doing business in a pan-european way is a bureaucratic hellscape.
It's a rock-solid distro, and if I had a use for enterprise support, I'd probably look into SLES as a pretty serious contender.
The breadth of what they're doing seems unparalleled, i.e. they have rolling release (Tumbleweed), delayed rolling release (Slowroll) which is pretty unique in and of itself, point release (Leap), and then both Tumbleweed and Leap are available in immutable form as well (MicroOS, and Leap Micro respectively), and all of the aforementioned with a broad choice of desktops or as server-focused minimal environments with an impressively small footprint without making unreasonable tradeoffs. ...if you multiply out all of those choices it gives you, it turns into quite a hairy ball of combinatorics, but they're doing a decent job supporting it all.
As far as graphical tools for system administration go, YaST is one of the most powerful and they are currently investing in properly replacing it, now that its 20-year history makes for an out-of-date appearance. I tried their new Agama installer just today, and was very pleased with the direction they're taking.
...so, not quite sure what you're getting at with your "Back in the day..." I, too, remember the days of going to a brick-and-mortar store to buy Linux as a box set, and it was between RedHat and SuSE. Since then, I think they've lost mindshare because other options became numerous and turned up the loudness, but I think they've been quiety doing a pretty decent job all this time and are still beloved by those who care to pay attention.