[pi-victor]

openSUSE is a really good and modern linux distro, people complaining about here probably haven't used it in a long while. Whilst i worked in A&T we handled a few thousand+ servers running SLES 11 SP2 and it was solid.

I think they're biggest handicap is they're not from the US and while i worked there people acknowledge they have horrible marketing. Also being bought and sold a few times doesn't help, and with the HPE acquisition a few years back, a lot of employees (on HPE side) simply left.

The kubic project has developed the only viable alternative to CoreOS that's being phased out. Unfortunately where MicroOS falls short is SUSE's stubbornness for using BtrFS, which causes a lot of headaches and has been dropped from all major distros at this point. People in the kubic project have also been contributors to kubernetes, kubeadm, OCI, (they even contributed a lot of code to podman, from Red Hat) and they've been a significant driving force for rootless containers https://rootlesscontaine.rs/. It's weird they're not more often in the limelight with all the hard work they do, but maybe they'll take this opportunity to fix their marketing and steer into a better direction :).

[mugsie]

The problem with kubic was the unknown space it was in - was it an appliance, or a generic distro with kubernetes packages. The btrfs stuff could have been quite good if they shipped btrfs snapshots as the update mechanism (like coreOS), but there was the pressure from the SLES/openSUSE side to let deployers install random software as needed, which meant you were left with the mess of "zyyper dup" + snapshot + reboot, and not having a known version for doing config updates.

The team behind is really smart, and doing good work - it just needed a forceful vision imposed on it for it to go somewhere.

[privateSFacct]

btfrs is such a weird choice for an enterprise focused system where people mostly want reliability / set and forget, though maybe the bad rep is old now (I haven't used btfrs in years).

[dmacvicar]

It is used for the root filesystem, which gives you nice functionality, like the package manager or YaST automatically taking snapshots in between system changes, which means you can then audit changes and rollback.

It even allows you to boot the system into one of these previous snapshots.

[mistrial9]

an engineering "teacher of teachers" I spoke with was able to corrupt btrfs with a few well-chosen strokes, as it was told. The implication was - not ready. This was three or four years ago.

[Twirrim]

I'm still reluctant to trust it, but there has been a lot of work on btrfs in that time frame, particularly around reliability and durability. https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...