> Both SUSE’s Management and Supervisory Boards have expressed support for the strategic opportunity presented by this delisting. They believe that it will enable SUSE to concentrate on its operational priorities and the execution of its long-term strategy without the pressure of public markets.
Lets hope their incentives more strongly align with their customers, now. I am a huge SUSE fan, been using their products for 15 years. What they've been doing the last 5 or so has been almost unparalleled in the Linux space.
I used to run SUSE about 20 years ago and have always thought it was cool but haven't kept up with it much since then. What are some of the things they do that make them unparalleled?
Open Build System and OpenQA, for automated building and testing of packages. This is what gets updates to their rolling release Tumbleweed faster than Arch, but with no instability ever. I can't emphasize enough how rock solid Tumbleweed is. OBS also doubles as their own AUR equivalent - you can make your own repo and do your own builds and install from the command line, or browse and install what other people have done.
Leap is their stable distro, and shares binaries with SLES, their enterprise offering.
Both Leap and Tumbleweed have BTRFS by default, with Snapper for automated snapshots at upgrade and boot. Update messed something up? System won't boot? Just run an old snapshot until it's fixed. Zypper, the package manager, has state-of-the-art dependancy resolution, personally the best I've used.
They have a number of extremely interesting spinoff projects: MicroOS and MicroOS desktop (recently renamed, but the new names are escaping me) which use immutable root filesystems with automated updates and native Podman support. Snapper integration shines there, as well. If it fails to boot after update, it'll automatically roll back.
They're doing quite a bit, and it's all culminating in being very useable. Tumbleweed is the crown jewel, though.
I have been using Tumbleweed for a few years now, but while it seems like a stable rolling release distribution, I am not quite sure about the "rolling release" part. Each month, a new snapshot comes out, which upgrades every single package you have installed, regardless of whether there were actual upstream updates. With a full Texlive installation and just a few more suites this amount to roughly 10,000 packages and over 5GB that need to be downloaded and installed each month. This a) kind of defeats the rolling-release aspect for me, b) takes a few hours, and c) feels like a cheat for the sake of stability.
Between those snapshots you might have bleeding edge updates for all the packages, but even then I do encounter package conflicts way too often. Well, on the upside, at least they are detected.
So yes, it is stable, but it comes at a price.
Apart from that, the community support felt mediocre, at least a few years ago. The most visited platform was a bulletin board forum with very little interaction. When I had trouble installing KDE, it took a few days until someone suggested the correct diagnostic tools. This is bad for being the testbed of a commercial distribution. In the end, I just installed Arch, which packaged KDE better than Tumbleweed did.
But on the other hand, maybe only if you use a distro long enough, you get to see the downsides, and each one has them.
There are new snapshots at least once a week. While there are large updates every once in a while, those are usually due to gcc or glibc upgrades which require a rebuild of most packages -- which doesn't happen every month. If you actually have upgrades of every single package every month, you should open a bug report to figure out what is going on -- that is absolutely not normal. On my machine I usually see 10-30 packages per update, with some updates hitting ~100 packages -- anything more than that is quite rare. Large rebuilds should be uncommon, though some packages might do them more than others.
There are quite a few things I've grown to dislike about Tumbleweed after using it for the past 7-8 years, but the upgrade experience is not one of them.
Great, thanx for telling. I'll stick to Leap. Update fatigue. We're using it on servers and I'm looking for something to replace Ubuntu on the desktop. I've grown tired of the usual Ubuntu antics like snaps, ads in apt update and the convoluted /etc config hierarchy inherited from Deban. SuSE is structured way more logically and makes more sense even if it's a rpm distribution. I don't want to use a rolling distro at work to break things just when I have to deliver stuff or fix time pressing issues. I've tried Debian 12 when it came out but Firefox was unusable, some very annoying focus issues on forms.
I'd like to know if the Gnome 4 in Leap was usable. If I do a search on software.opensuse.org on gnome-desktop it only turns out packages from tumbleweed and experimental packages from SLE-15-SP2 which looks quite ancient.
You can always run Debian testing on desktop. I'm running the same installation more than a decade now. It's not "bleeding edge", but recent enough. Things slow down during freezes a bit, but it's a rolling distro at the end of the day.
>Each month, a new snapshot comes out, which upgrades every single package you have installed, regardless of whether there were actual upstream updates.
A) Snapshots come out far more regularly then once a month. Going from the mailing list we've actually had a snapshot released every day since the 4th. I'd say the average is one every three days but that's just from the top of my head.
B) they do not cover every package you have installed: They don't even know what packages you have installed, snapshots are cut on the repo side. It's true that packages get rebuilt a lot but that's because either the package updated or a dependency of the package updated that caused the package to be rebuilt.
That's called a trade-off, a very fundamental concept in pretty much everything in life.
And no, snapshots don't come out every month. They come out ~5 times every week. The most number of packages I've had to update was maybe around ~3500 and that's after 6 month of not upgrading my system.
I agree for "true" rolling distro enthusiasts, Arch is still the top choice, but Tumbleweed is great for those seeking to use a rolling distro without sinking too much time into configuration.
Uh, I've been using Tumbleweed on two machines for about seven years now, and I've experienced multiple cases of MATE just not working after an upgrade. It's not that big a deal, though, as you point out, because of snapper.
That said, I'm still using Tumbleweed on both machines, and I'm very happy with it. Even the nVidia situation is acceptable now that they offer a repo with the official drivers.
+1 for zypper. The GUI feels very "enterprise-y" but in a good way. You just pick the software you want and it gets the job done quickly and with a minimum of fuss.
Zypper has the best UX of the CLI package management tools i've tried, at least as far as updates and installation come. My favorite part, which is minor and yet makes finding packages you might want to keep an eye on when updating, is how it highlights with a color the first letter of any package to be installed/updated/etc. It was a "why don't other package managers do this?" moment the first time i saw it.
(ok perhaps other package managers do it nowadays, but i installed openSUSE 2-3 years ago and i haven't really tried every package manager out there - mainly apt/apt-get and pacman as it comes with msys2)
This isn't borne out by the numbers, for the average package. Not for openSUSE or for Fedora. The only full Linux distros I currently see with a higher percentage of up-to-date packages than Arch are KaOS, CRUX, Slackware and NixOS: https://repology.org/repositories/statistics/pnewest
Of course, whether or not the most important packages to you hit each distro first could be a totally different story.
Overall, openSUSE Tumbleweed is very up-to-date, though: ~76% by this measure— right up there with Fedora Rawhide and Gentoo.
Having used (and still using) Arch for over a decade, I can tell it is probably a good thing. Maintainers seem to know which packages bring trouble after updates and they do seem to test those more thoroughly.
I have not experienced major breaking changes for desktop or other important piece of software in many years now.
For example, things like Gnome always come to Arch months after it has been released upstream. But it makes sense because Gnome team always break existing extensions and community can't really keep up so it takes a while until popular extensions gain support. And sadly Gnome without extensions is more or less useless. Maybe Fedora gets latest Gnome on day one, but it is unusable without community extensions on day one.
I moved from Ubuntu to Tumbleweed a year ago and slowly warmed up to it.
Two days ago some update made it fail to start sddm (the display manager, aka graphical login screen) correctly. Some error regarding missing libraries. Network is also not working anymore.
After trying to repair it for a while I am about to ditch it and go with KDE Neon or Mint (their Debian edition sounds interesting).
I will look into this Snapper thing you mentioned, maybe that helps. Otherwise my trust in that distro is unfortunately gone.
All these are nice features but until I see suse wiki pages in google search results along side the ones I see from arch, it's just easier to stay on arch.
> Open Build System and OpenQA, for automated building and testing of packages. This is what gets updates to their rolling release Tumbleweed faster than Arch, but with no instability ever.
Arch also has "no instability ever". And I don't think I've ever run into a problem where I've said, "damn, I wish the latest version was out right now", other than needing to run mainline on new machines for a few months that is.
But please don't take this comment the wrong way, I'm curious and will probably spin up a VM or two to take a look around.
Lolwat. I've tried it in earnest several times over the years on basic thinkpads (once on my only development machine, in which my only customizations were basically installing intellij ides and docker) and I would never ever, call it stable. I mean, if someone were to ask me for a picture of instability for a dictionary and they asked me to choose between Arch Linux and Windows Me logos... I'm not sure which I would choose.
To be fair though, I haven't tried it in 3 years since it last bit me. On the other hand I've had fedora running on one machine for like 7 years straight.
ooo, that auto rollback sounds really cool-- got any idea how that's done? I assume it's handled by checking for eg. a dirty-fs-flag just before the initfs boots the real system, but what if there's breakage in userspace (eg. the login manager) or in the initramfs itself?
I have to say, openSUSE introduced me to btrfs and while it isn't something i use often, when i do need the snapshot functionality it provides it is such a great feature.
The automatic snapshots saved me quite a lot to time on 2 occasions, where borked updates of the nVidia drivers resulted in problems booting the computer. On one hand, this should never happen. On the other, as long as nVidia does not improve, and nothing is going to force them, it is great to have such a safety net. It gets out of the way 99% of the time, but it is there when you need it, it’s great.
By a bizzare coincidence, I just had a breaking update today. CUPS was missing some symbols and wouldn't start. Rolled back to an earlier snapshot and all is well.
To add to the SP, the initramfs is kept on the same filesystem as everything else by default, not on a separate partition, so the initramfs is loaded from the snapshot too. However if GRUB breaks then you won't be able to boot.
Rock-solid distros with packages that keep with the times and that are as user-friendly as it gets for Linux installs. Both Tumbleweed and Leap are great.
We have far fewer issues in my lab since we replace CentOS with Leap (our experiments with Ubuntu were dreadful and we cannot babysit the computers so anything with complex maintenance is right out).
Going all rolling release was a step too far, too much of a culture shock, but we might switch to Tumbleweed in a couple of years if the stability remains as it is now.
So I just installed it yesterday on my new home PC. Switching from Windows after I sold my old PC. (I do like gaming sometimes).
Installation worked flawlessly. Hardware was detected on the spot.
I could install NVidia's official driver through YaST. Installing Steam from the package manager.
Now I am sitting with a switch pro controller and playing Hogwarts Legacy.
All around a solid experience. Their biggest competitor in this space might be Ubuntu. For me Suse has a more solid feeling to it. Also supports KDE better.
I choose Tumbleweed. Reason being that I do gaming and often you need the latest package of something to be able to. Although, I do not have any experience with Leap so maybe it is good as well?
I do back up my own files, so there is not much danger in it for me.
For a very stable distro experience at work, I use debian (stable). But it lags a few years behind, so is no good for games.
I ran SUSE around the same time (2001-2002ish), because it was the only major distro (between RH and Mandrake, primarily) that would install on my archaic 128MB PII. Debian worked but my grade school brain had no capacity for setting up Xfree86 manually. I stuck to SUSE for about 1.5 years before switching to Mandrake (and, eventually, Fedora Core) on my new Athlon XP desktop.
My nostalgia for them will probably always be strong.
Sounds like we pretty much had the same Linux story!
I started with SuSE 7 (purchased it!), then Mandrake, then Fedora, then Ubuntu, then Arch and now reluctantly back on Xubuntu because I can't get my laptop to sleep properly on Arch...
Do you remember why you switched from SuSE? I only have vague memories but I feel like the package manager might have been a bit clunky?
Maybe I should give openSUSE another go, I really dislike Ubuntu's 'ads' and snap.
Well, mainly I was young and still exploring a fresh and vibrant scene (much unlike the relatively mature Linux of today), so that was half of it.
The other half was that whenever I searched for an RPM for something I needed, it was almost always a Mandrake or RH package. RH was a pain with things like MP3s and proprietary drivers, so Mandrake seemed obvious. And yeah, SaX/YaST was a little clunkier than Drak.
I went to Fedora Core in their first version because the third party repositories became seamless enough and they were easily the best supported, especially for on-the-edge software.
Went through some Arch, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Pop_OS! etc days in-between there but have mostly settled on Fedora KDE, these days.
A lot of the sibling comments are talking about this distro itself but they are also neglecting SUSE foray into the container orchestration space with Rancher and K3s. I would assume that is where they are looking to grow.
Well this was pretty expected as it's how EQT normally operates - they purchase objects - develop them for x-years (normally about 5-ish) before re-selling or re-listing.
They've been in SuSE since 2018 - so the IPO was their try at exiting, but since it didn't work out, they're probably going a different route (couple of more years of development, then selling to someone else).
Melissa Di Donato, the SuSe ex-CEO is wife of Darren Roos, CEO of IFS (huge Enterprise Software company) - who are also owned by EQT.
EQT tends to invest heavily in their development objects, so it's probably a good thing - but they are also very adamant on timely progress, so good luck to all SuSe oldtimers who are still with the company - it's going to be another roller coaster.
Don't know that I've ever been optimistic about a company being purchased by private equity.
Anyone have counterexamples where that turned out well for customers?
The justification sounds good, but they'd say something like that even if the plan was "squeeze money out of the company at the expense of users and customers and reputation."
It's the same PE firm which owned SUSE before, orchestrated the IPO, and now, still a majority shareholder, buys the minority shares back.
If you bought in at any time between the IPO and May of this year, you'd be in for losses, so it's certainly not been an unprofitable move for them. But it's not the classical "foreign vulture PE comes in and destroys everything" situation here that people seem to be afraid of.
Many could argue that Dell improved substantially after its 2013 transition to private ownership. At least, from the consumer perspective, things improved drastically. Linux support, a wider variety of competitive lines with much needed improvements to legacy lines, adoption of AMD for CPUs/GPUs, etc.
I can't speak of their server/enterprise business, however.
I think Dell went downhill after the acquisition, their hardware quality is junk all across their line: servers, workstations, laptops, monitors, etc. Every device from them that I had my hands on recently have, at best, terrible build quality, and at worst, multiple failures. And their support is a bad joke.
That's the complete opposite of my experience. I bought an XPS 15 (it supported Linux well) and broke the screen (my own fault) about 8mos into owning it. Spoke to support and they sent a technician over two days later. They replaced the screen, tested it and were on there way 40mins later, all for free.
I've had to replace the BIOS twice in the 3 years I've owned my Dell XPS 15 (2018 model). Both cases were spontaneous failures that completely disrupted my workloads and customer support told me it's something that "just happens". Service technicians came quickly but I'd rather not need them to come in the first place.
First year warranty is usually included in the product, so of course the replacement was free. I'd suggest renewing the warranties until EoL of your laptop as these service trips will likely become a bi-annual fixture.
My experience was limited to laptops and monitors, but hardware's been good and service has been excellent.
Honestly, it reminded me more of early-Amazon customer support, than anything more recent. E.g. support agent following up with a personalized email to me to make sure everything worked out okay with a warranty claim. Talking to humans was novel and pleasant.
It’s all about the tier of support. At work we bought 20k laptops and screwed up the support spec. So we ended up with some garbage tier support that wouldn’t fix issues caused by Dell docks. You have to have “ProSupport”
We also have a region where they have a 2 hour support SLA with part in hand. They will literally put your computer down to fix ours to avoid whatever punishment that gets meted out.
ProSupport is amazing, especially on Dell hardware on eBay which still has extended coverage remaining that can be transferred. Immediate phone connection to knowledgeable and helpful technicians.
I dunno, looking at dell.com now all I see are bad CGI mockups of products and "AI" boldly slapped everywhere. It looks like trash and nothing like the Dell I used to use and own 20 years ago. I almost think the company is entirely fake and produces nothing based on their site today.
The basic problem that gives private Equity firms a bad reputation is that winding down an fading company that have fundamentally stopped growing over a 3-5 year lifespan, is a pretty good way of getting a good return on investments so it happens a lot to downward sloping companies with enough of an nostalgia inducing brand to be newsworthy.
It’s not the only ways PE companies make money sometimes they do actually allow companies to thrive on the long term by letting them escape the short term thinking that some stock traders demand but those tend to fly under the radar as well it’s not as newsworthy as some beloved brand turning to dust over a 5 year time span.
EQT the company in question here bought SuSE from Novell for a song listed it on the stock market in 2021 for a pretty decent profit and is now buying back stock at about half what they sold it for in 2021, so is itself kind of an counterexample to the narrative that PE firms always destroy what they buy.
> When Warren Buffet bought Berkshire Hathaway in 1962, he rapidly turned it from a failing textile company into a monster.
It's not like he improved their textile business. He took the name as a shell for his investment activities.
> Not private equity exactly, but he personally bought up 51% of the shares.
That's the opposite of the "without the pressure of public markets" situation though. He was doing quarterly reporting and answerable to shareholders (in some ways more answerable than a CEO who doesn't own the majority of shares - there are specific protections for minority shareholders).
Buffet bought Berkshire Hathaway entirely out of spite and has said that it was the worst investment he's ever made. The textile company continued to do poorly under his ownership, and shut down nearly 40 years ago.
I am ambivalent and withholding judgement. Hopefully this is a process to protect SUSE from greedy VCs who want to capitalize any value they can get their hands on, but it could also be a long-con process to punish SUSE for daring to fork Red Hat at their organizational level.
I've been hearing a lot about private equity lately (particularly from folks who used to pursue VC money in the past). Can you expand a bit on the negatives of PE?
Not op, but as i understand it: they swoop in, load up the company with debt, fire lots of people, then go "oh, fiddlesticks.. whelp, what can ya do??" and throw up their hands as the company inevitably crumbles.
Citation: Read up on how Toys'R'Us was put through that wringer.
Edit: actually, here's a good write-up:
"Less attention was paid to the albatross that Bain, KKR, and Vornado had placed around the company’s neck. Toys “R” Us had a debt load of $1.86 billion before it was bought out. Immediately after the deal, it shouldered more than $5 billion in debt. And though sales had slumped before the deal, they held relatively steady after it, even when the Great Recession hit. The company generated $11.2 billion in sales in the 12 months before the deal; in the 12 months before November 2017, it generated $11.1 billion."
That article discusses PE rebuilding Dollar General successfully. A lot of it depends in what condition the companies are in when they get bought. It isn't all corporate raiders.
My recollection of Toys 'R' Us was actually that the owners deliberately tanked it. They may have originally wanted to save the company, but they spent years deliberately buying and selling pieces so that Toys 'R' Us would hold all the debt while the profitable pieces went elsewhere. That wasn't an accident.
"Private equity can stack the deck in other ways, too. Firms can direct businesses they own to buy other companies and then act as broker on the deals, reaping transaction fees. After its buyout, Toys “R” Us acquired a number of companies, including FAO Schwarz, eToys.com, and assets from KB Toys (itself a failed reclamation project of Bain’s). Consolidating brick-and-mortar and online toy businesses may have been a good-faith strategy. What’s certain is that the deals helped generate $128 million in transaction fees for the owners."
What the article misses is that FAO and KB were sold off before the bankruptcy, with Toys R Us keeping all the bad parts, specifically their debt.
Is there any reason for the buyer here who already owns almost 80% of the company to offer a 67% premium for the remaining 20% of the shares? What would have happened if they offered a 30% premium or a 15% one (from what I understand, they have both simple majority and qualified majority so that means they don't really need to ask anyone for anything). It's not like they want to get 100% ownership since this is a purely voluntary buy-out and existing investors can choose to stay.
In Finland if someone controls over 90% of the shares they have right to forcefully buy rest of the shares (and also obligation if someone wants to sell at at that point). So if they wanted to go fully own the company they need to high enough offer that they will at least hit 90%. I'm not sure if you could from public company to private without all shareholders agreeing to it as that would benefit large shareholder at minority holders cost.
No clue if there are similar laws in Germany or other countries.
Interesting; if someone does this, do they have to pay a premium at all, or are they able to buy them at the exact current market rate? Also is this just for publicly traded companies or private ones as well? At least in the US, my understanding is that private companies set the "fair market value" of their shares themselves, so I'd be worried that someone could purposely set the price low to be able to buy them out more cheaply.
There is redemption committee in Finland Chamber of Commerce that will assign a arbitration court to handle the redemption. They will also assign a trustee who will represent the minority shareholders.
The valuation is decided during the arbitration process. From what I understand if there has been previous offer to buy it's quite likely that will be used at least as initial basis for the price.
For me in the US, it’s a strange notion that you could compel someone to buy the last 10% of the company. That does not always seem possible. What happens if you literally can’t do it? That’s probably rare, but if 90% of the company is most of your assets, and you’ve somehow borrowed against it already, it could be almost literally impossible.
In Italy you are actually compelled to do a "residual buy" if you own 90% of the company.
This is supposed to protect small investors from finding themselves owning shares they can't sell on the market anymore.
The price is set by the equivalent of the SEC.
If that fails to buy all the shares, the company must sell enough stock so that the market is again liquid enough.
I _think_ many countries have similar rules, as cursory googling shows the London stock Exchange changed their minimum free float requirement some years ago.
In worst case if someone is demanding it and it went through the arbitration process (and possibly appeals) it would be the same as any other debt. If the shareholder is a company the debtor could initiate the bankruptcy procedures. Of course it's possible that they could end up not getting full amount (if anything) from the estate if there are more debts than what assets were worth.
If they are private person they can attempt to judgement via court and let enforcement authority liquidate their assets or garnish their wages.
They do have obligation to buy if the minority shareholders demand it. If they don't want to trigger the requirement they need to keep their ownership under 90%.
There's also requirement (with some exceptions) to make offer to buy publicly listed company's shares when the shareholder's control over the votes increases above 30% and 50%. Normally the price in that case would be the highest price that shareholder paid for the shares during previous 6 months.
It's probably a question of who exactly holds that other 20% of shares... There's a decent chance it's mostly held by one or a few long-time investors/contributors/??? and the premium is the price of good-will.
There can be a lot of reasons and I’m not sure you can find an answer unless they directly give you one.
I would guess that it’s part decorum part attempt to minimise the administrative burden. Many European PE’s operate on a “there is enough money to be made by being fair” sort of motto. This can be because they mean it, but it’s also because not being “evil” it a marketable product to many EU investors (this is likely true outside the EU as well, but I only know about EU markets). Then there is the part where private companies are still responsible for keeping track of ownership, as well as informing them. Even if they plan on letting investors trade on some internal platform it’s still a rather large administrative burden that becomes easier the fewer shareholders they have.
This is still just me guessing, but the way I read this it’s a simple message. Investors get a nice out and they’re going to be disappointed if they don’t take it.
My knowledge on this is limited, and US-specific, but I'd imagine the situation in Europe is similar... In the US, publicly traded companies are subject to a lot of laws that private companies aren't subject to, most notably being required to make periodic public disclosures about finances and (to a more limited extent) business plans. Making false statements on these required disclosures is a crime, even if not intentional. The majority stakeholder might've done the math and realized that it's cheaper to buy out the other shareholders than it is to continue making those disclosures and risking criminal prosecution.
In some countries, minority stake holders over a certain percentage (5% ?) from memory can be entitled to various measures as well. eg being able to check the company books / financials, and so on
it looks more to me that the key feature is the wording "long term" in their announcement.
if you plan long term strategic shifts, most shareholders will bail out earlier when the quarterly publications once doesn't look too good. which hurts the whole plan.
so if you need to invest long term, it's better to get rid of those short term investors, which can bring everything down. private you don't need to publish your results, that's why most German companies prefer to stay private. they think in 6 year plans, not 1/4th year plans
My guess is that they personally prefer to own 100%, but for various reasons around who specifically owns the remaining shares (e.g. senior employees or friendly firms) they don't want to force them to sell.
So they instead offer a large premium and hope/assume those parties will accept.
My bet: they want to restructure and sell the company. Selling something you don't fully own is tough so they'd rather control 100% of it and then sell it, even at a loss.
I hope that SUSE saved the staff of Rancher from the previous assholes who ran the place. God that was an absolutely awful company to work for. I'm glad they started their own stupid acorn or whatever service nobody will ever use. Rancher had a lot of incredibly intelligent people who were treated like absolute shit.
You were grinding your Engineers into the ground and sold 3-6 months after I started. We were wondering why we were so overworked and then we knew, you were in the middle of the sale and probably just trying to get big names under the portfolio. This was at the HEIGHT of Covid no less so we already had that additional stress and nobody at Rancher cared about that at all. There wasn't a single email or meeting or anything giving people grace that I saw, telling them if they need time away to take it, etc, the entire company just acted like nothing was going on. Absolutely the opposite of the next company I went to.
I've only worked at one other company that comparatively treated their Engineers as badly and overworked as R. I started at the company with 3 other people on my team. None of them were there 1 year later, including myself. IIRC I quit after 6 months on the spot with no backup plan.
We were expected to make how-to videos, how-to articles, make labs, run labs w/public questions, give hour long tailored demos, 2-5 meetings with clients a day (potential and current) while also doing the actual technical work to deploy clusters, technical work testing various things (like Longhorn performance), complex cluster troubleshooting, all while having to keep on top of knowing everything about k8s and infra daily. Probably much more I don't remember right now. I worked SO many nights and weekends to keep caught up as did others.
I was so excited to work there as a k8s contrib getting to actually be paid to work on k8s and it was .... that. Thrown into a meat grinder with no room to breath. Every single day and week.
Rancher worked decently well until about a year after the acquisition. But I’m not so sure about some of the design decisions like in-place node updates.
I don’t know how to feel about this. I want to be optimistic, because in my view OpenSuSE is one of the best distribution for the general public, and has the right balance of bleeding edge and stability for my use case. Hopefully this will mean that they’ll be able to support the community with fewer incentives to extract money for shareholders or distractions with the share price. Otherwise I’ll be in a pickle to find another distribution for daily use.
While in many ways not comparable to what's happened with Redhat, with Suse turning to the dark side one wonders how much longer Canonical will last before doing something similar.
Make no doubt about it, private equity is all about short term shareholder returns. That's not a bad things in principle but if you don't want to wake up yet again with your distro having the rug pulled out from under it, switch to Debian.
Debian is great indeed (I am a a Debian developer myself although rather inactive) - but today’s news isn’t much of a change in whether SUSE is or isn’t on any definition of the dark side.
Why do I say that? Simply, as per the linked announcement itself, this takeover offer is by the current majority shareholder who already owns 79% of the company. They can already win any shareholder vote they want to win. They already control SUSE.
Most of what this will do is two things: one, pay the current minority shareholders of SUSE 67% more than their shares are worth on the open market, and remove the quarterly earnings pressures of the German equivalent of Wall Street from SUSE management, at least unless and until any future IPO or a sale to another public company. Not obvious that this transaction makes anything worse than it already was.
There could be a less obvious difference: SUSE currently has a German corporate structure with very strong worker rights including participating alongside management on the supervisory board. If they get rid of the German entity and keep only a Luxembourg entity, that may no longer apply, though German labour law certainly still would for employers based in Germany. I’m not an expert on any differences between German and Luxembourg worker governance participation rights, and in this paragraph I’m more raising a question than asserting anything.
> pay the current minority shareholders of SUSE 67% more than their shares are worth on the open market
For anyone who paid the IPO price of 30 EUR (and it went up to 40 in the months after the IPO), it would mean a realization of their losses. You'd be forced out of your position, down 46% compared to the IPO price. The PE firm probably gave a large chunk to banks at discount prices to facilitate the IPO, but still, this was a really good deal for them.
Even if they won't end up delisting, the jump of the stock price caused by their announcement will have done really good things to their balance sheets, and given that they will pay for the buy-out with a dividend, all it took was to move some money around from daughter company to parent company.
Their ultimate goal is to sell at a profit. IPO is staggered not to sink prices. But apparently there was not enough appetite for more than 20%. So, so far a failure for the PE.
Usually fund strategy calls for an exit in 5y. If after 5 years they don’t see a good enough return, they need to change strategies. Delisting helps do major surgery in the shadows (labour), and broker a deal that either makes them money or allows them to save face…
My guess is as someone said, reduce costs, implement some income boosting measure, touch up the numbers and sell it privately. Expect a lot of this for half-IPOed PE tech acquisitions made the past 4 years as they realize they will be holding the candle forever, since they bought at peak prices.
> If they get rid of the German entity and keep only a Luxembourg entity, that may no longer apply
If that was the case, I’d bet 10$ that the german government would intervene and block that. Germany is all for free market until its their stuff in sale.
SUSE S.A. has been owned by this very same private equity company since 2018. In 2021 one fifth of the outstanding shares were offered to investors at the Frankfurt Stock exchange.Now that fifth is being acquired by the same private equity company.
If there was any turn "to the dark side", surely it must have happened 5 years ago, not today, right?
Edit: Apparently time flies faster when you're bad at math.
I presume their definition is “owned by some huge and/or evil parent corp”, together with viewing IBM and private equity firms as each having one or both of those attributes.
I’ve seen many valid criticisms of Canonical, but huge doesn’t seem applicable to them and evil seems to go beyond what’s fair for their flaws. As for their owner, again, few would place Mark Shuttleworth in the same category as either IBM or private equity firms, other than probably having had a peak (though not current) net worth of over $1 billion.
> SUSE has committed to declare and pay an interim dividend to all shareholders [...] will be funded by SUSE through a combination of existing cash and additional borrowing [...] in the form of loans [...] to a maximum of EUR 500 million.
So EQT is asking SUSE to take its cash, borrow up to 500M EUR, pay a dividend (of which 79% goes to the PE fund). Then EQT will use (some of? All of?) that money to buy more shares. It doesn't sound like EQT is investing any new money into SUSE here.
Sounds like EQT will do well regardless of whether SUSE ends up going private. SUSE meanwhile will get another (up to) 500M of debt and lose a chunk of its cash from its balance sheet.
Basically from quick math, this amounts to financing 80% of the buyback through debt and 20% through presumably cash brought by the investors listed alongside EQT in the press release.
(If all non EQT shareholders accept the offer, EQT will earn c.€460m in dividend, while the full cost of buying back those same shareholders, including dividend, is c.€580m.)
What we don't know is how much EQT will be diluted by those new investors in the end.
What are the success stories of private equity firms taking over a corporation? (Where success is the products are still made, quality and staffing is maintained at previous levels)
Think about it - you're having beers with a friend and he goes "so the company got bought out and then nothing changed". blank stares as everyone waits for the point / rest of story
You hear only of the dramatic ones. Bit like news is nearly entirely bad - bad news sells.
People forget that PE firms are buying equity. If the company prospers they get the upside. Contrary to popular hn belief destroying the thing you just paid a lot of money for is not standard game plan.
>Where success is the products are still made, quality and staffing is maintained
The world you describe is not the world we live in. Shareholder objectives - PE or otherwise - is to maximize value. It's not an artisanal hobby where highest possible quality product is the end goal.
None. Private equity's entire business model is to suck the quality and staffing out of the product and make money off the gap between the product getting cheaper and people moving to a viable alternative.
PE is basically a parasitic business, designed to suck money out of the purchased company until it collapses. You do this by borrowing a ton of money to purchase the company. Then for the privilege the company pays the buyer a special bonus that conveniently covers its costs (and often more) out of the cash it had on hand when bought. Then the buyer continues to get various payment streams, like guaranteed dividends or all sorts of other obligations, until the company collapses.
Sad to say I'm not exaggerating.
I say "basically" because there are a couple of exceptions. Dell was purchased in a special deal with the founder so that the company actually operates but the founder was enriched in the process.
VC is a branch of private equity (an almost invisible pimple on the PE business TBH) where they don't buy the whole company and hope to make money on the IPO. But it's a small business: there are numerous companies out there with an asset base larger than the entire VC industry.
That's been my experience twice now personally, and having read numerous other accounts. They'll always tell you after purchase that's not the case, how they see long term value, want to grow it, etc etc.
It's never true - if PE buys your company, run for the hills.
Basically you get rid of the quarterly reporting grind and it lets you focus on the business even if certain initiatives are going to depress shorter term results, but pay off over the long term.
Dell is a special case because it was the original founder who delisted the stock. Not some Bain Capital type firm that was just buying it to suck the marrow out of the bones before tossing it in the trash.
Safeway might be OK for shoppers, but it's terrible for the workers. My Grandma worked there from 1965 to 1985, and watched the decline in the 80s. It was a really good paying job with a good union and good benefits when she started. My brother and cousin worked there a decade ago. Today, the union is a joke, and the hours and pay are the same as any other minimum wage job.
Berkshire Hathaway is a public company and IIRC Buffet only owns about 15% of it. So it really that different from a large corporation with many subsidiaries which also runs an actively managed investment fund at the same time?
There are many such companies (otherwise PE as a concept would eventually die out as the supply of fools becomes exhausted). But just one example: Gibson.
To be fair, SUSE before Novell was in a worse state. If I’m not mistaken they were close to missing payroll and has tried to shop themselves to Sun before Novell agreed to buy them.
Evil IBM(TM) threw in $50m to help the deal along and preserve SuSE for its hardware.
Also, it didn’t help that SUSE folks and Ximian folks were like oil and water. Novell tried a combo that made sense on paper but there was culture clash.
Steinway is my go-to example, but it was done on a very specific (hyper-long-term) investment thesis, not a standard "corporate raider" investment. I'm guessing that SUSE is not in the same position.
lol. This does not happen, at least not intentionally. PE takeovers are solely about turning companies with a relatively stable revenue stream into a packageable financial product. Huge cuts will be made to staff, support, and R&D to get expenses to a specific level, and large amounts of debt will be taken on under the company's name, to deliver a specific ROI to the PE investors over a relatively short term window of four to five years, all under the assumption that the company will be able to coast for that time on its previous success, after which point it can be sold for IP, trademarks, and any physical plant, or just allowed to go bankrupt under the unsustainable debt load and lack of investment.
That's the purpose of PE firms. They accept pre-investment in this sort of scheme, and do this with several companies at once over a 5-7 year total period, taking a slice of the revenue with no capital risk of their own, and the investors get a good 5-7 years of 12-18% ROI. The companies are trash at the end of the cycle but hey, that's capitalism.
Source: I was "lucky" enough to work for a tech startup through its IPO period after which it was acquired by PE, and exactly the above happened. We had the opportunity to "buy in" to the investment cycle with our own money, and so they had a pretty detailed presentation about exactly how this all works. I was somewhat surprised by how honest they were willing to be with the employees (although it did take a little bit of reading between the lines).
Love it!
Personally i dont think the public offering has done them any good.
They are unparalleled in the kubernetes space and im expecting much more awesome things to come. (and no, i dont simply mean clicky bunty rancher)
By now i am suggesting Suse products to all my clients with the guarantee that even if i get hit with a bus and will not return, there will always(!) be someone to support their software. They are for instance the only ones actually doing this.
Cloud times are shifting again, especially with machine learning and i could not be happier about it.
The fact alone that with windows 11 a lot of orgs have a LOT of compute simply being thrown out makes for excellent dev environments and local clusters
Red Hat has much less product on the market for this purpose and is nowhere near as complete as SUSE. OpenShift is powered by kubernetes. SUSEs solution IS kubernetes.
Furthermore, i think they have clearly demonstrated how they see things.
Guys while I know that Redhat also contributes to SIGS for kubernetes, My point is that SUSE is just much more available.
This is especially true on the edge and unless you are a megacorp, i don't see anyone forking over money for the license.
The open source offering is not to be used for production and simply as a testing ground for features that make it upstream...
OKD, could have been a closer match to k3s in terms of cost but not necessarily simplicity and we are not even talking about how ready rke2 is.
SUSE's offerings, provide a balance of simplicity and enterprise features, making them compelling for SMEs.
Here in Europe there is not even a question about it. Kubernetes is free and in the end of the day simply a wrapper of apis, which should not require licensing.
You do know red hat contributes far more to upstream kubernetes than suse/rancher don't you? You know they helped google open source it, don't you? Rancher certainly got the jump on red hat for lighter weight deployments, but to claim that it is more kubernetes than the red hat offering shows you don't actually understand what you're comparing.
yes im very well aware of that, but i am also very well aware that from an actual user point of view, SuSe is the much better choice. For everybody without unlimited credit cards, Suse is also the much better choice.
From the viewpoint of the average IT worker, Suse is also the much better choice!
Recently I’ve been getting more and more into the Rancher ecosystem as they always have some offering that meets my needs and I can trust it will interop well enough.
I really hope that this does not affect the future of Rancher.
When a product is great but a company turn bad usually most of the good DEV flee. I think it is quite frequent that former developers start a new company or join a company that has the same of developing that product or a fork of it.
X formerly twitter was one of the biggest LBO in history which is typically the process PE companies acquire companies as well. Priority is to increase margin, because the leverage comes from loan and debt servicing & principal repayment are pretty big sums. Its done capex reduction. Easiest way to do it is to reduce labor cost. X went from >7000 to ~1500(I may be off on numbers)
Another is to increase revenue, so twitter blue(a subscription) and increasing incentives to be on twitter blue(no ads, potential account growth because you are shown up on follow list, no or less throttle on number of posts in feed).
This is a good thing, for those who actually want to see SUSE evolve and reshape itself to fit the next generation of Linux distributions -- which is to have immutable base operating systems for containers to run on, combined with plenty of options for backwards compatibility to continue to accommodate the old systems. Without going private it is not clear that SUSE ALP, which is a technically brilliant idea, would hold up to market skepticism to see its completion.
> SUSE’s Management Board and Supervisory Board support the strategic opportunity from delisting of the company as it will allow SUSE to focus fully on its operational priorities and execution of its long-term strategy
What does this mean? Is their current status adding some significant overhead that would go away by going private?
Going private means you don't have to answer to shareholders and their short term demands, which may be a good thing for a company. Of course it would be naive to assume that the private equity firm that bought it is in it for the good of the community rather than pure profit.
Probably that as a private company it would be easier for them to do things that would have negative short term impact on revenue but be better for the company in the long term.
SOX and other SEC regulatory constraints and costs. Disclosure rules. Shareholder accountability for strategic decisions. Stricter accounting and audit requirements. Often your board has representatives of large shareholders, who have their own considerations and limitations, as opposed to owners.
Shareholder pressure is also the need to make the value of the share grow, with any mean, or shareholders will buy something else and the value of the company will go down, no more deals paid with shares, no bonuses for the CEO, etc. A private company might attract different managers and pursue different goals. However Finance and Industry usually don't go along well. Finance eats industries to make profits.
Ok naive question but SUSE was the first Linux distro I used 15 years ago and never touched it again. For those of HN that use it today, what's their strength compared to RHEL or Ubuntu in the enterprise world?
Honestly, all the distributions "just work" and are "stable" (i.e. they don't crash and corrupt your data). You could just pick up a random one. You will find some specific problems affecting you, sure... you will report (or even fix) them and, after a while, the distro will be perfect for you (it will still have some problems, but none affecting you because you have reported/fixed them).
The main thing about RHEL is that it's "stable" (i.e. it doesn't change) over a crazy long period of time. If you are selling software, the lack of change makes it easy to support. If you are buying software, it's a good platform to use because developers support it.
RHEL being historically the most popular "doesn't change" distro, I have never seen a big point in using other. Nowadays your vendor is probably also supporting Ubuntu, though. SUSE? A lot of them will support it, but not all. As long as the vendors you use support the distro you use it doesn't matter, I guess.
Firstmost an close relationship to SAP due to being headquartered in the same German region.
Secondly SuSE have an relatively good track record of delivering an stable and predictable distribution with SLES, and have been around longer then any other commercial Linux vendor, and despite several changes in ownership over the years it's never been felt as an user.
Compared to Ubuntu running SLES is breath of calmness with changes happening slow and well coordinated and while RHEL used to be the same that's changing after being taking over by IBM.
Just recently I was reading about OpenSuse thimbleweed rolling release. I read a lot of Great things about it, everyone said it was great.
Then I saw a couple of videos and realized its UI (of their control center) is stuck in the 90s and it has several rough edges (like when installing it, I wont show you a list of WiFi access points, but ask you to manually enter the name of your AP and the encryption method... in 2023).
I decided to keep Mint. So far it's been the best distros in terms of "not having to bother" so much. I use it as my daily dev environment.
How many times in a year do you expect to go into the "control center" to change config? And how bad is it to have an old UI stuck in the 90's [1]compared while most distros still expect you to edit config files like in the 70's/80's[2]? Besides I am pretty sure you can configure tumbleweed without even touching that control center.
I haven't tried tumbleweed, but I have tried Mint a few months ago and it didn't really striked me as having much more modern tool and I don't think I even used a configuration management tool.
[1] that many people would praise nowadays by the way.
[2] which still works really well and is still a pretty good UX imho.
And thus the squeeze cycle can begin anew. Brauckmann made his money, DiDonato made her money, the EQT guys made their money. Time to share this cake with more ants.
Rancher price increases over the last few years have made it prohibitive for a good number of our customers. Personally, I don't think SUSE has done much to evolve the lifecycle side of Rancher - I want a platform that updates my node operating systems when I upgrade Kubernetes (this has been in OpenShift for years and is in Tanzu). Rancher OS was silently killed off, forcing us to rebase certain customer environments, at the time RKE and Micro OS didn’t play well together, that seems to have changed somewhat but the lifecycle side is still seemingly immature. Harvester looks interesting but we haven’t found many uses-cases for hyperconverged Kube (or perhaps more accurately, appetite within enterprises). Neuvector though is pretty damn awesome. I wonder how this plays out against the Red Hat foot gun, and if it’ll allow SUSE to aggressively go out to displace RHEL (My feeling is most of the high paying enterprise customers don’t really care about what Red Hat has done).
SUSE was private just a few years ago, owned by the same firm that IPOed them and is now taking them private again. If there were any truth to your statement, it would’ve happened a while ago.
> Private companies funded by public funds is my jam. So, most of the tech megacorps in the US
I think you're getting a bit confused by the terms public and private. Most US tech megacorps are public companies e.g. publicly traded private enterprises. They're public companies because they're traded on the stock market, not because they receive "public funds" aka funding from the government; that's not what a company being public means. You seem to be mixing these two up. Insofar as they get money from the government, it's generally in exchange for providing services to the government (aka doing business) or as subsidies, but these aren't what make a company 'public'. Being traded on the stock exchange is what makes a company 'public'.
> Oh, the glory of fasc...ehem, capitalism.
You should probably pump the brakes on adopting any sort of ideology before you get a firm grasp on basic terminology.
"You should probably pump the brakes on adopting any sort of ideology before you get a firm grasp on basic terminology."
Oh, I know basic terminology.
Faschism - when big private enterptise is in service to the government and having lucrative, beneficial and unfair deals with the government or it's agencies.
Most of big tech and MIC companies in the USA have beneficiary status (multi-billion deals, tax-exemption, etc..) with the government or at least one of the alphabet soup agencies. In other words, US government learned much from the Nazies.
Strange spellings, is your spellcheck off? If your intention was to communicate your familiarity with these terms, you're failing badly.
And no, US tech companies getting paid for fulfilling lucrative contracts for the government is not what fascism is, even if there is corrupt dealing. Corruption and fascism are not interchangeable concepts. And to reiterate the point, a company being publicly traded does not mean they are receiving public funds.
And FYI, SUSE is not even an American company so your rants are completely irrelevant anyway. They have little if any connection to the US MIC.
Fascism is when I can’t make rules about how other people spend their money. Hilarious when people associate capitalism with a movement founded by none other than Benito Mussolini. If you read the fascist manifesto and the Green Party platform back to back you’d think they came from the same book.
Is SUSE relevant? Maybe I live under a rock, but I don't hear anyone talking about using it for anything anymore. Feels like 10+ years since it went off radar
> They believe that it will enable SUSE to concentrate on its operational priorities and the execution of its long-term strategy without the pressure of public markets.
What have they put into a contract to make sure that happens.
Companies will make many promises when they undergo changes in ownership. All those words and intentions are worth nothing unless they are specified as part of a binding legal contract.
While fears of PE is quite well founded in many cases, EQT might be one group that might actually have proper long term interests.
Ownership of EQT goes up to Investor and the Swedish Wallenberg family, they're the same people that among other things has held big stakes in Ericsson, Astra Zeneca (The British covid vaccine),etc over 90 years by now.
No, but they shouldn't be allowed to not act as fiduciaries, and do what they do now, which is to load debt, do bolloxed sell-lease contracts, and basically take money from all sides, and screw everyone else into a pulp.
It's a garbage model out of a Dicken's novel and is a huge reason why a groundswell of anti-capitalistic sentiment keeps growing. It's a case study in "worst practices" of venality.
> which is to load debt ... and screw everyone else into a pulp
Individuals are just as capable of doing this, just look at Twitter and there are plenty of adequately run companies owned by PE. We just don't pay attention to them.
But yeah somehow severely limiting debt funded acquisitions (when the debt is offloaded to the company which is being acquired) would probably be a very good idea.
Yes, but fiduciaries aren't (and even VCs generally try not to).
" there are plenty of adequately run companies owned by PE
Define "adequate" and which ones are they? I've certainly experienced directly and indirectly enough to know I'm quite burned on them, and I have yet to meet a single person who enjoyed dealing with one, that wasn't one; anyone on the receiving end of endless cost cutting, sell leasebacks, forced vendor changes to more closely align with portfolio choices regardless of sense, etc.
No, the people who seem to love PEs are either Ayn Rand's fluffer contingent, adjacently or are making money off one already without having to be subjected to their profoundly absent graces.
The PE firm sees a path to profit by changing things about SUSE. This might be fine - e.g. they can write off the existing debt to themselves in order to strengthen the company finances. If the exit plan is some variant on improving the company and selling it on, could be good all round.
The trepidation is that PE firms are also a bit prone to asset stripping and discarding the remaining carcass of the organisation, in which case this marks the beginning of the end of SUSE.
I've no idea how to tell which path is more likely or even which is their current intent though.
1)Expedited vendor lock-in: Figure out who is locked into the software, make the software maximally shitty/maximally costly so that these people would still not switch and then make money off the cost savings/higher prices and hope to make up investment.
2)Off market prep for trade sale: SUSE could be interesting for someone to acquire but a competitor/strategic buyer can't afford to buy the company and do the reorgs needed itself as it would tank the share price too much. The PE firm buys it, does the reorg off market and then does a trade sale of a reorged company to the buyer, but only now SUSE is way better as an acquisition target.
openSUSE was one of the first Linux distros I ever used. When I picked it up, I was just a kid, and new to the whole GNU/Linux universe. I quite scared of the command line, and along with the relatively familiar KDE3 desktop, openSUSE's emphasis on comprehensive graphical configurators appealed to me.
As I grew more comfortable with Unix fundamentals and I learned more about the GNU/Linux desktop userland, I left openSUSE behind because I didn't care so much about the GUI configuration tools like YaST. I bounced between Gentoo, Ubuntu, Arch, and more obscure derivatives of each, experimenting and learning a lot about the 'bones' of a Linux distro: the init system, the display server, the initramfs tooling, the filesystem, etc. I became especially fascinated with the 'bones' that truly make a class of distros unique: the package manager and the developer tooling used by maintainers to build the distro.
At some point I revisited openSUSE and realized that underneath the more 'superficial' things— important things, but things that are visible from the get-go— I'd loved about the distro as a newcomer were some truly impressive 'bones'. I can back to find that zypper was the most powerful, ergonomic package manager (of its type) that I'd ever seen. I was blown away by the flexibility and diligence of the Open Build Service infrastructure and how easy it made it for me to maintain repositories for nearly any distro, and grateful for the generosity of the openSUSE org for letting basically anyone make an account and leverage that sophisticated build infrastructure for free. The fact that they even automated QA for pre-boot stuff using screen scrapers and QEMU left a lasting impression on me.
Some years after that reintroduction, I fell in love with NixOS, which is now my daily driver everywhere. But I still have a lot of respect and affection for openSUSE.
I hope this change helps drive openSUSE forward over the long term. openSUSE is a great operating system that I'd recommend to anyone looking for a traditional distro that's pleasant to use and easy to maintain. openSUSE seems extremely underrated, at least here in the US.
And everyone should check out the Open Build Service. You know how on GitHub, you can browse to any repo and click the 'Fork' button to get your own copy that you can hack on and publish? OBS gives you that for Linux packages. You can automatically put together a repo full of packages that track whatever upstream source you like, but build with your own custom patches, build for your CPU architecture, etc. You can even fork a package from a different distro (or different release of your own distro), have it build against whatever you're running, and then get dumped neatly into a repo for you. (All builds happen in clean slate VMs, so you are very unlikely to miss any dependencies.)
Sadly, I’ve been through the PE takeover experience. It wasn’t pleasant and the surviving company bore little resemblance to prior self. The best that can be said for the experience was they gave me a decent buyout. Leap was my main driver for a good number of years though of late Arch in VM has been my daily. I see a migration from SUSE in the near future.
"Sadly, I’ve been through the PE takeover experience."
Same (more than once)...in both cases there were a few positives and a cavalcade of negatives, with the latter category expanding like a famished amoeba.
I could fix the whole PE realm in one move: require PE firms to operate as fiduciaries, with severe penalties for failure to comply. The whole sector would collapse or stop sucking, and I don't care which happens.
I know. I had considered just going to Tumbleweed. But that's why I tried Arch. And since they extended Leap's EOL for another year, it gave me more time to play around and figure out where I wanted to land.
So...uh...after all that drama from SuSE about how 'IBM' destroyed RHEL after acquiring Red Hat, they turn around and get acquired by the nearest bidder. That's hilarious. Nowadays I often compare this kind of hypocrisy to the 'Avengers: Age of Ultron' scene where Strucker shouts 'No surrender!' and riles up his henchmen, then immediately turns to his second-in-command and says, 'I am going to surrender'.
Nobody. And I never insinuated that they shouldn't get wholly acquired. I just said that they made a big song and dance about how getting acquired was the downfall of Red Hat, then went ahead with their own acquisition. That's what I found funny.
> Both SUSE’s Management and Supervisory Boards have expressed support for the strategic opportunity presented by this delisting. They believe that it will enable SUSE to concentrate on its operational priorities and the execution of its long-term strategy without the pressure of public markets.
Lets hope their incentives more strongly align with their customers, now. I am a huge SUSE fan, been using their products for 15 years. What they've been doing the last 5 or so has been almost unparalleled in the Linux space.