I’m in the UK and even though i have a SLED boxed media set somewhere from circa 2005 (YaST was cool, their Xen user experience beat any other distro at the time) - it was news to me that they’re still alive.
Anecdotally, i feel like RHEL dominates the UK enterprise linux market as well as NA
SUSE is used pretty widely used in the European financial sector, right? That’s what I remember hearing the most about it.
EDIT: I’m referring to non-personal workloads, i.e. enterprise. Pretty much everything I’ve come across in a working environment has been Red Hat based, I’m not talking about personal local or VPS environments. Ubuntu and Debian do have a presence, but not at the Red Hat scale from my experience.
Luckily it's not winner takes all, nor is it "second place is the first loser".
SUSE may be overlooked from a US perspective, which is why they get much less coverage than they deserve on sites like HN. They are huge in Europe and employ some exceptionally good people, and have been making probably the most solid distro out there since ~1994.
Oh I totally agree with you. Suse Linux 6.0 was my very first linux distribution around 1998 or 1999. I've professionally managed SLES, SLED, and even migrated a netware server to open enterprise server. It is great stuff and I'm glad to see it still alive.
The market is big enough for multiple large Linux distributions (Redhat, SUSE, and Debian^WUbuntu*). The market continues to grow as more things transition to computers.
Every now and then I try a Linux distro other than SUSE (currently, openSUSE) and am left disappointed.
Mostly it is the size of the repo. openSUSE has everything. I guess that shouldn't be too surprising, the Build Service also builds packages for distributions not their own: https://build.opensuse.org
And of course there's really nothing as good as YaST for system configuration.
They also provide a full aarch64 OS for the Raspberry Pi, something which is surprisingly still quite rare.
SUSE 6.4 was my very first Linux distro, my dad had bought the full CD set because he wanted to try out "that Linux thing". We never did get it to work with our modem, but I had fun playing around in KDE and Windowmaker.
I've been through a number of distros; SUSE as mentioned, Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo, Arch, Mint, KDE Neon, probably others that I've forgotten. I installed openSUSE Leap 15.2 on my laptop last week and immediately I felt right at home. KDE as the default desktop with no weird modifications nor excessive vendor branding, plus a well thought out default Btrfs partitioning scheme with good use of subvolumes (and CoW disabled on /var, nice detail) and snapshots for easy backups and rollback in case of botched upgrades or config changes.
The only minor gripe I have is their choice to ship Firefox ESR, but I understand why they do it, and it was easy to add the official repo for the latest release version.
I talked with someone from a North American company which runs their product on SuSE. And asked why SuSE was chosen instead of more popular Red Hat. Apparently Red Hat wasn't providing the premier level of support the company needed so they went with SuSE.