The real news for me here is that SUSE still exists.
nods head Yup, sounds about right.
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.
Scientific Linux, which was built exclusively for HPC, was based on CentOS.
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.
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.
SLES is recommended for SAP installs, a huge enterprise market.
Anecdotally, i feel like RHEL dominates the UK enterprise linux market as well as NA
https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/display/ATopics/Supported+Plat...
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.
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 heard for example that Intel was/is a huge user and used it on their computing farm.