EQT eyes potential $6B sale of Linux pioneer SUSE, sources say
65 points by shscs911 2 days ago | 34 comments
Hasz 7 hours ago
SUSE made some interesting hiring moves lately, I am not surprised they are gearing up for a sale or major investment.
replykdamica 16 hours ago
What does ‘enterprise Linux’ actually mean? Not asking snarkily; I’m curious what the main differences are between this and other Linux distros. Is it mostly about getting good tech support?
replyehnto 16 hours ago
Yeah it's about support contracts, which covers a lot of services actually such as maintaining security audited package repositories. But most importantly it's about support life cycles you can rely on for a long term investment of time and infrastructure outlays.
replyFor example, RHEL 10 has a planned support phase out until 2035, with extended support available until 2038.
They do tend to have a different goal for their intial installation and configuration to consumer distros, with a focus on security and providing tools you will need in an enterprise hosting environment.
vmilner 12 hours ago
> For example, RHEL 10 has a planned support phase out until 2035, with extended support available until 2038.
replyI wonder if that's 19 Jan 2038. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
Conan_Kudo 11 hours ago
RHEL 10 lacks 32-bit x86 packages, so it goes past that date. RHEL 9 support ends before that date.
replynunez 10 hours ago
Support, especially for older releases (which is important for heavily regulated companies that can't upgrade on a dime).
replyMore heavily vetted (i.e. older) kernel and support for every package in their repository.
Guaranteed security hotfixes with some time guarantees.
Training and certification programs.
jmclnx 8 hours ago
If they are sold, which I think it would be a good thing, I hope a competent organization. But these days, it will probably be another Private Equity Company that will force it to go all in on AI, eventually ruining SUSE :(
replytw-20260303-001 7 hours ago
> which I think it would be a good thing
replyOnly if the buyer is an-EU company. If it gets picked up by a non-EU entity, it will most likely end up being a stick in the rear wheel of the sovereign cloud bike.
PeterStuer 6 hours ago
Another potential L for EU software sovereignty. Let's see if Brussels lets this pass.
reply
That's potentially true, but not necessarily. I haven't looked into this particular case, however it's entirely possible that a lot of the EU have started divesting from Windows and into suse, which has caused a big spike in revenue here.
Or its PE doing PE things and it's all a farce.
What gives you that impression? They had $700MM in revenue in 2022 and many HPC clusters run on Cray OS[1] (which is SLES).
> If SUSE gets 6 billion dollars
Not how sales work.
[1]: https://top500.org/statistics/list/
>> "More than 60% of the Fortune 500 rely on SUSE to power some of their workloads, according to the company."
This is an Enterprise version of Linux, and unless you are in the enterprise space you're unlikely to come across it.
Also from the article; >> "The company generates about $800 million in revenue "
So again, this suggests that people are indeed using it.
I mostly like their use of an immutable OS as base layer for the virtualization - despite the limitations it sometimes has.
I remember since the start that SUSE was more popular in Europe, but no way would that be the case in the US. If anything, I’d be willing to put my money on > 60% of Linux installs being RHEL/Centos rather than SUSE
Also, from my own experience, SUSE used to have nearly all of the US geointelligence processing because of the HPC connection mentioned elsewhere with CrayOS, but that went away when DNI forced everyone onto the CIA's private AWS service, which only had RHEL AMIs available. The national labs and more niche intelligence processing that can't run in the kinds of machines AWS provides still make heavy use of it.
I think Ubuntu Pro is more common in service providers that sell to enterprises rather than in enterprises themselves. It enables them to say "yes, we comply with all of these box-ticking standards that you require your vendors to have!" without bringing in much of the rest of the enterprise baggage.
SuSE is used more heavily than any of them - as others have said, they're used more or less everywhere where SAP is to be found, and they're very strong in the HPC space too.