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Comment by Kocrachon | Hacker News Reader

I've worked for a few small businesses that used suse as an alternative to RHEL. I've never worked for a large company that has. I also know a few individuals who use it for personal projects. But that's about it.

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Rolls-Royce uses SLES for their high performance computer clusters, but RHEL everywhere else.

I used to maintain their US Linux infrastructure.

i worked in BigEnterprise and they changed to Suse from RHEL because the price was significant lower, and the company had internal admins and other support contracts for managing the server support. The rule was that every software had to have a support contract behind it, even if we never used it.

I've encountered it in large enterprises (esp. public sector) that were running NetWare, eDirectory, GroupWise, Zenworks, etc., and went to SUSE (more specifically OES) as the natural follow-on from NetWare. One large organisation I'm aware of, they used to have both SUSE and Oracle Linux, and SUSE was managed by the former NetWare team, and Oracle Linux was managed by the Unix admin team and used for Oracle RDBMS and Oracle middleware.

But, in my experience, most eDirectory/GroupWise shops ended up migrating to AD/Exchange, and SUSE often went away in that process, especially if the organisation already has RHEL or Oracle Linux as well.

eDirectory etc is where the per seat licensing of OES comes from, BTW.

Thinking about it, I wonder how many pure SUSE/OES (without Windows) shops are there, for example in small businesses.

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