openSUSE deep sixes Deepin desktop over security stink SUSE has kicked the Deepin Desktop Environment (DDE) out of its community-driven Linux distro, openSUSE, and the reasons it gives for doing so are revealing. SUSE's security team published a blog post – Removal of Deepin Desktop from openSUSE due to Packaging Policy Violation – that makes for eye-opening reading. The news …
...is inevitable, unless from a vending machine
Nowadays even those are often EFTPOS only. The chances accompanying whether the selected product is dispensed or not remain unchanged.
With Europe and the US parting rags perhaps SuSE might start eating Redhat's lunch in Europe at least.
As the overt RHELatives start to diverge significantly from their RHEL equivalent the attraction of a fully supported non-US enterprise Linux which SuSE offers might lure customers from the Redhat sphere of influence.
Redhat had turned into a company with a half dozen very large customers (regarding the science community as a nuisance) long before the IBM aquisition
Their persistance in academic use is very much a "You can't go wrong buying IBM" moment and we've repeatedly see what happens when groups adopt that mindset for prolonged periods
OpenSUSE has been my distro of choice for ages, having played in the past with Yellow Dog on an old G4, and Slackware previously before using *buntu but then abandoning it because Kubuntu used up far too many system resources just running the desktop, and also played with Arch and Manjaro. Been using Troubleweed on my last couple of laptops almost exclusively, and headless on a couple of RasPi servers. In a lot of ways, I'm gonna miss YaST, myself, overall. If the replacement tools can provide all the same functionality for server/network stuff, though, I can live without it just fine, since YaST also bleeds over to settings that really should be dealt with at a user level, and its configuration changes can conflict (sound, mostly). And the Ruby dependency has broken it in the past for me. I guess, I'm left reserving judgment until I see how well the replacement(s) work. Splitting up the system tools like that *would* be technically going back more to the "UNIX philosophy" anyway.
I have love YaST just for its convenience, especially when learning a lot of the stuff (setting it up through YaST, then reading through the config files, both before and after many times).
It was interesting, and a humbling experience. Linux in general wasn't so user-friendly circa 2006, and all the CLI/UNIX stuff I thought I had learnt on OS X really wasn't enough to do anything interesting that I wasn't already doing on the Mac[1], so it was pretty but not entirely useful for daily computing. I suppose I could have moved all the IDS stuff over there and done more with running servers but it was still good for learning.
[1] Running an ssh/VNC server, IDS, and KDE 3 and its suite + Pan2 newsreader
Like some of the other posters here, I have been a SUSE fan since the early 2000's. These days, I am more distribution agnostic. All I really care about is a development team that takes its job seriously, and sufficient installed base that users find and fix the problems that inevitably crop up. We are in a much better place right now than the early days.
"SUSE's engineers have raised these issues with the upstream developers"
That kind of comment is kind of rich given my experience with deep problems in Suse where they essentially "ran away" and wouldn't even respond to Novell senior management (USA or European) trying to find out WTF was going on
The appalling taste of such "support" on 6-figure contracts turned them into a "Never do business with this outfit again"
What's worse is that this kind of thing isn't unusual when dealing with German/Swiss software companies. If it becomes "too hard" they simply put up brick walls
The only worse companies I've had to deal with were Taiwanese (Acer and Asus in particular, who responded to increasing levels of customer complaints by deleting their support websites and forums). Mainland Chinese outfits can be difficult to deal with but they don't adopt the "we know better than YOU!" attitude you see all the time with German outfits.
That’s also my experience with German software companies, e.g., AnyDesk, which is FSB - full stack fubar, and TeamViewer, which insanely spent 275 million (euros or dollars?) to put its name on Manchester United football jerseys then raised their license fees enormously to cover the cost.
I installed SuSE back in the early 2000s when I walked 3 blocks to their tiny US office. Back then installing Linux was pretty intense, e.g., you had to read the version of the RAMDAC on the chip itself and enter it in the setup wizard, which was barely useful.
I forgot about SuSE as user friendly distributions came out, all of which blew me away with the ease of setup, plus SuSE closed its US office around the corner from me.
Very interesting article although the headline sells the content short. Besides Deepin there's an excellent current state of affairs with OpenSUSE section. We have benefited, even enjoyed, YAST very much. And the description of the importance of YAST compared to the usual way of running things was very nice. And the discussion of the roadmap was good to. Looking forward to more!
Booting out Deepin encourages me to give Tumbleweed a try sat home but the iso doesn't boot on my Dell Lunar Lake laptop. Freezes hard at "Start Plymouth..." and needs a power recycle. In failsafe mode, it boots to a login prompt. Same results with different images over the last month or so.
After using SUSE since 7.0 Pro and then openSUSE from 11.0 on, with the immutable filesystem coming and other atypical Linux changes being made to the Leap distro, we jumped from 15.4 to Tumbleweed (the openSUSE rolling-release offering that still supports i586 and full X.org without the immutable filesystem). No complaints. The 2/25 TW installed changed base security from AppArmor to SELinux - which came with more than a few growing pains, but those have been largely resolved. So as Leap looks less like Linux, there is still an openSUSE option in Tumbleweed.
I am a long term user of Deepin Os and I would venture to suggest that the problems which afflicted Suse were of their own making. I have NEVER had any problems with the Os at although version 23 is in my view deeply flawed.
For some strange oriental reason they have banished synaptic from that version which for me ruins it. At 81 I am past feeling any urge to get creative with my operating system and find synaptic to be essential to install the wide range of utility's I like to run in batches, I probably won't last long enough in any case.
I wonder if YaST will still remain in Tumbleweed? It's great both as an installer and for system administration and Agama + Cockpit are a sad joke compared to it.
Seems that the only real USP of SUSE over Fedora/RHEL is the fact that it uses Snapper for btrfs snapshots by default. An advantage which mostly falls away with immutable distributions anyway. Unfortunately, immutable KDE distro, OpenSUSE Kalpa, is still "alpha" for some reason, so most folks will probably download Fedora Kinoite instead.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
