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.
Anecdotally, i feel like RHEL dominates the UK enterprise linux market as well as NA