[cyphar]

> Red Hat is a fantastic company, and a pioneer in successfully commercializing open source. However, beyond Red Hat the effort has largely been a failure from a business standpoint.

SUSE started around a year before RedHat, in 1992. Sure, we haven't had the same success and growth, but I would disagree that RedHat pioneered the model. I wouldn't even argue SUSE pioneered it (arguably it was Cygnus in 1989 -- though it was eventually acquired by RedHat in 2000). And even earlier you could argue that RMS pioneered it with his distribution of GNU Emacs in the early 80s (which had a description of the business model as the final chapter in the manual).

[I work at SUSE and am obviously biased, but it is a little bit annoying that people always ignore that we still exist...]

[freehunter]

Purely anecdotal and I've never worked for or on a team whose main responsibility was Linux administration, but at two places I worked in the past, our Linux guys didn't like SUSE. It wasn't a technical problem, and more marketing could probably help fix the problem.

I have a SUSE Linux certification, and at two companies folks from the Linux team commented that SUSE makes them uncomfortable because they're unsure of how to pronounce the name. It's like GIF or Porsche but worse. Half of them pronounced it Suzy, like the person's name. Some pronounced it closer to Zeus with a -e at the end. Some pronounced it "Soos" like it has a silent -e. They preferred Red Hat or Ubuntu not because of technical superiority but because they were embarrassed to attempt pronouncing SUSE. It's likely the only time they heard it pronounced was from coworkers who didn't know how to pronounce it either.

[cyphar]

There was a video explaining how to pronounce SUSE several years ago (both funny and a little worrying that such a video was necessary)[1]. It is pronounced strangely since it was a German name and so you have to put on your best German impression to get the "s" sound right.

All jokes aside, I think most folks would agree that SUSE's marketing really needs to be reworked very significantly.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4lFHP-UxTk

[taejo]

The German pronunciation would be pretty close to "zooza", so the pronunciation in that video isn't German, and a German accent would hinder you from pronouncing it that way (in German you can't have the /s/ sound at the beginning of a word followed by a vowel). Either way, "sooza" and "zooza" are not exactly hard for English speakers: they're just completely non-inferrable from the "SUSE" spelling.

[cyphar]

Yeah, most of my German colleagues say "zooza" -- but saying it this way makes it difficult for English speakers to infer what you're talking about. So I say it as "sooza" even if it's _slightly_ incorrect.

[RoutinePlayer]

Respectfully, this is something I've never been able to understand about open source projects. Why stick with names that are difficult for most humans, and causes folks to forget your great company still exists? Why not run a small marketing and imaging campaign to sort that out. You already got a great green chameleon logo :-)

[type0]

It's an acronym, spell each letter in your own language and be confident that it will be correct

[kbutler]

Are there still people who pronounce linux lie'-nucks?

And Linus Torvalds[1] originally pronounced it with a bit more ee and oo (almost lee-nooks) than he does now[2] (lih'-nucks).

[1] https://youtu.be/uK0xXFZtJ8Q

[2] https://youtu.be/5IfHm6R5le0

And gnu and gnome and Debian and nginx and SQL and GIF and ...

The industry is full of made-up words with non-obvious or disputed pronunciations.

[iforgotpassword]

> Are there still people who pronounce linux lie'-nucks?

In German it's the stressed "ee" variant. I think with made up words that don't appear to belong to a certain language, yoiu just tend to pronounce it like it was a word in your native language.

Google in contrast just looks English because the "oo" is much more common in english, just like the "le" at the end (apart from some regions where you append "le" to nouns to make them sound small/cute).

[bradknowles]

I try to use his original pronunciation wherever and whenever I can, but most of the time I hear “Lin-ucks” with a short “I”, and I naturally respond in kind without even thinking about it.

But then there are occasionally articles like this one which remind me that I’m saying it wrong, and that I know better.

[jcbrand]

Ubuntu's pronunciation isn't exactly clear to English speakers either.

People needed to be told that it's Ooboontoo and not You-ban-too (or whatever else people came up with).

[NikolaNovak]

Fascinating!

As a non-native English speaker, yet one who's been in North America and dreaming in English for 2+ decades, Ooboontoo was the one and only pronunciation that came to my mind (I suppose because it's a fairly phonetic interpretation).

To me, "You-Ban-Too" is a completely "you have to squint and tilt your head and really want to see it" pronunciation/interpretation :->

[scarejunba]

It's partly because of the flattening of certain vowels that happens in Am English. Like how con is similar to Kahn in Am English, bun has a little ah to its uh. Hence u (you) bun (bahn) tu (Too).

[freehunter]

Right, fortunately Ubuntu has enough marketing behind it that most people who know Linux already know how to pronounce it. SUSE's marketing is more limited in that regard.

In 2006, Ubuntu was a ridiculous name. Then Canonical's marketing kicked in.

[bradknowles]

I’ve been using it for years, and only today have I learned that I’ve been pronouncing it wrong.

Sigh....

[SmellyGeekBoy]

> SUSE makes them uncomfortable because they're unsure of how to pronounce the name.

Amusing the irony in this considering most people pronounce "Ubuntu" and indeed "Linux" incorrectly.

FWIW, it was the first distro I ever tried back in 1999 and I always pronounced it "Suzy" but have heard a few variants. Everyone pronounces different words differently so it doesn't really matter.

[saidajigumi]

There's a fascinating solution to this problem, used by Nikon[1]:

[...] Nikon Corporation (that's Nikon Japan) officially and consciously blesses all regional pronunciations of their company name.

This is policy, agreed upon decades ago—likely in the 1950s—in some meeting room somewhere in Tokyo. Nee'kon is correct. Neye-kon is correct. Nick-on is correct. Many others are correct.

This was explained to me when I was a Nikon employee by the Executive Vice President of Nikon Inc. himself, in the flesh. I can still picture the conversation, 25 years later. And to anticipate the usual objections: Nikon Corp. is the ONLY, the SOLE, the UNITARY authority on this question. "Nikon" is not a natural word in the Japanese language. The company that is now Nikon (then Nippon Kogaku, K.K.) made it up. It's a brand name—like Kodak or Xerox. A neologism, and maybe even a portmanteau (that's debated). It was likely first conceived in the Latin alphabet, not in Kanji. Nikon Corp. gave birth to this name, and they own it. They get to make the rules about it. And their rule is clear: all regional pronunciations are equally correct. If you doubt this, just listen to their own regional advertising, produced by the company's various subsidiaries around the world. You'll hear several different, completely official, pronunciations. Oy. I feel better now.

Addendum: Of course, it goes without saying that however they pronounce it in Scotland is wrong.

[1] https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photogr...

[freehunter]

Hyundai does the same thing. There are multiple regional ways of pronouncing the name, all blessed by Hyundai headquarters.

https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-25813198

[HeyLaughingBoy]

I get that it's a German company and that they can name it what they want, but I also think it's part of the problem. The only reason I know the correct pronunciation is because I was in a class with a Swiss person who made reference to it.

More generally, it's an example of why I think that, for US companies, "weird" names are a bad idea. People don't like to sound stupid and something as simple as a name that's difficult to pronounce, or sounds odd can limit adoption of your product.

[bradknowles]

I’ve been a Linux user and Administrator since late 1998, and various forms of *nix before then.

I’ve known of SUSE for a long time, but it was never the name that stopped me from doing anything with it. I just never used a product or worked on a project where it was used, and so I was never exposed to it.

TIL, I’ve been pronouncing it wrong for probably something close to a decade.

[h1d]

Isn't it pronounced 'sues'? I doubt it's the name but it always makes me wonder what Suse's position is. Is there anything specifically better than Redhat or Fedora?

It may have bigger market in Europe but when I heard it sets the default file system to btrfs when others are jumping off that ship, I wonder what their plan is.

[freehunter]

German doesn't have a concept of a "silent -e" for their words. Like how Porsche is pronounced Porsch-uh, SUSE is pronounced "Soos-uh". I don't work for/with SUSE but I also accept when people say "Suzy" because at least it acknowledges that the -e is supposed to make a noise.

[notacoward]

I think you're being a bit over-sensitive. They said a pioneer, which does not preclude other pioneers. Also, what's the bar for "successfully" commercializing open source? In a world where anything less than a unicorn is considered failure - and bear in mind the OP is from a promoter of that ethos - Suse's trajectory might not qualify. Even if it did, it would be one of the few exceptions to the general rule that commercializing open source largely has been a failure. Open source as a development method is alive and well, but as a business in its own right not so much.

P.S. Eight years at Red Hat, ending a year and a half ago. Glad not to be under IBM's inept thumb as my erstwhile colleagues soon will be.

[falcolas]

> it is a little bit annoying that people always ignore that we still exist

Count me among them. I wasn't even aware that the SUSE Linux project was still a thing, let alone one backed by a business.

Marketing might not be a terrible idea at this point in time - the best product in the world won't sell if nobody knows about it.

[beatgammit]

It's very popular in Europe, RedHat is very popular in the US.

I think the IBM acquisition is a fantastic opportunity for SUSE to start their engines here in the US. They have a fantastic value proposition: start with openSUSE Leap for free, then upgrade to a paid SUSE contract (can be done on place). This should appeal to CentOS and Fedora users who consider using RHEL, but don't because it's too hard to switch. They can also appeal to people who don't need the IBM integration but feel like they're not getting as much attention as before (priorities will likely change at RedHat). They can also appeal to developers with their rolling Tumbleweed release (which can also convert to openSUSE Leap/SUSE).

If SUSE had publicly traded stocks, I'd consider buying in right now as they have a really good opportunity over the next few years to steal customers from RedHat/IBM. They're big Linux contributors (Greg Kroah-Hartman used to work on the project), so they are _very_ attractive.

[eloisant]

In France, I've never worked for or even heard about a company that uses Suse. It's usually Debian if the sysadmin have all latitude, RedHat if certifications or having a company behind the product mattered for the managers.

[mprev]

At this point SUSE is just as niche in Europe as it is anywhere else.

In an enterprise setting, why would you throw your lot in with a company that seems to change owners every few years rather than the biggest name in open source that also now happens to be owned by IBM?

[forapurpose]

> This should appeal to CentOS and Fedora users who consider using RHEL, but don't because it's too hard to switch.

It's hard to switch from Fedora and CentOS to RHEL? Isn't CentOS almost exactly the same bits, minus the branding and a few proprietary pieces?

[type0]

It's not something that RH says you could so there you go. You can't just pull one system out and put a new one, specially Fedora, this would be equivalent of pulling a rug from underneath someone standing on it, who knows you might be lucky, just try it.

SUSE on the other hand encourages switching after the introduction of LEAP 15, in other words it's supposed to be trivial to do.

[madhadron]

I was delighted to find that SuSE has started using btrfs to do the same root filesystem snapshotting that Solaris does with ZFS! Suddenly it was back on my radar after not paying much attention to it since the 1990's (I went into Debian land and stayed there, pretty much).

[h1d]

You need to read more into the news. It's actually a reason to get unexcited about.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14907771

[cyphar]

Red Hat doesn't have any btrfs engineers, they all moved to Facebook -- so they don't currently have anyone in-house to do btrfs work. SUSE does (one of the upstream maintainers is a SUSE guy). Facebook also runs btrfs.

Red Hat's plan for "replacing" btrfs is to write a bunch of additional tools around devicemapper/LVM. My experience with using LVM is that this is not going to end well -- if you thought btrfs was unstable you've seen nothing yet.

To be clear, btrfs does have its issues, but linking to RHEL no longer supporting something they never actually fully supported is a bit of weird thing to argue is a negative of btrfs. Red Hat doesn't get to by the sole arbiter of what is and isn't good software (and it should be noted that Project Atomic's snapshotting using ostree is simply not as good as using btrfs and the transactional-update integration into openSUSE Kubic -- btrfs snapshots are atomic for a start and rollbacks are a single syscall away).

[erikb]

Is anybody still using Suse besides some big three letter corps?

[cyphar]

Yes. https://www.suse.com/c/success/

[NikolaNovak]

FYI/FWIW, I think they were preferred for Canadian Government / Shared Services Canada deployments until a few years ago

[spicytunacone]

What's preferred now? I know Canadian schools liked SUSE as well.

[NikolaNovak]

I believe SSC currently prefers RedHat, but I'm nowhere near the authoritative source :)

[erikb]

I also heard, that the American continent is more and more Blue Hat focussed and Suse is more a European thing.

[bewo001]

Wasn't there a close collaboration between IBM and SUSE?

[cyphar]

IBM uses several distributions. I know that both RedHat and SUSE (and probably Canonical but I'm not sure) have IBM departments as customers.

[wmf]

Back in the early days of enterprise Linux, IBM wanted to avoid Red Hat becoming a monopoly so they backed SUSE (and later Ubuntu) quite a bit.

[h1d]

And then it got too big for IBM to pay a fortune to stop taking its pie?