Input Support for SUSE Linux (both openSUSE and Enterprise SUSE)

[Arch Linux]

As many of us should be aware, CentOS is being discontinued, with an 'end of life' (EOL) currently scheduled for December 2021 of this year for CentOS 8. With CentOS 7 being offered extended support in only 3 short years (2024).

openSUSE Leap 15.3, the Linux distribution SUSE released in beta last week, represents a departure for the German software maker in that it's nearly identical to its commercial distribution, the one that makes it money. It's also a good candidate for replacing CentOS, the free Linux distribution that's been popular among enterprises which Red Hat, its developer, is now planning to stop supporting.

Leap will no longer be merely based on the source code of SUSE Linux Enterprise. It will share the exact same binaries. This means that with its next stable release, in June, there will essentially be no difference between the free-to-use community distribution and SLE, which requires registration and a paid support contract to use in production.

Leap was created in 2015 as a counterpart to openSUSE's flagship community distribution, Tumbleweed, which sits upstream and is used as a testing ground for SLE. While Tumbleweed is a rolling release and uses the latest, cutting-edge software releases, Leap sits downstream of SUSE Enterprise, with a traditional release schedule and a conservative approach to software that eschews the cutting edge over stability.

This is similar to Red Hat's traditional approach with CentOS and Fedora, where CentOS sits downstream of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a freely available clone based on the same source code, while Fedora, until recently, sitting immediately upstream tasked with being RHEL's testing ground.

But while Red Hat has decided to reposition downstream CentOS (renaming it CentOS Stream in the process) to sit upstream, between Fedora and RHEL, as the new testing platform, SUSE has decided to double down on its free downstream counterpart by making it something of an identical twin of its commercial distribution.

I have been using both Open SUSE and Enterprise SUSE for years. It is rock solid. I have not found a single RPM on CentOS or Red Hat that could not load and install on SUSE. Migrating from CentOS to SUSE was so easy and effortless you'll forget you're using SUSE.

I respectfully request that the Plesk development consider future support for SUSE.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

 

[IgorG]

Once upon a time, in early versions of Plesk, we supported SUSE as well as Fedora and even OSX and FreeBSD. But due to the high support costs with extremely low demand, it was decided to refuse to support these operating systems.

 

[Kaspar]

Although support for more Linux distributions can look like a good thing I am not sure it really is. I suspect Plesk does not have unlimited resources. Adding support for more Linux distributions would likely be at the expense of something else if it does not result in more customers. Seeing as openSUSE Leap is new there isn't a large user base (yet) that would justify spending resources on Imho. Besides, Plesk already supports multiple Linux distributions plus Windows.

I rather have Plesk use their resources on supporting the current distributions the best they can and adding new useful features to Plesk.

Don't get me wrong. The development of openSUSE Leap is definitely a good thing for the Linux community as a whole. I really hope it becomes a success and gains lots of users. Who knows, perhaps one day there will enough demand for Plesk support.

 

[Arch Linux]

I fail to see your plan for when CentOS is discontinued. Is your goal only to be glad you have one less OS to support? It seems very shortsighted.

Those people are going to migrate elsewhere and likely to another RPM-type package distro. At the moment, the time of this writing, besides Red Hat, which CentOS users were not paying for, to begin with, SUSE is the only stable mainstream alternative. It will be disappointing if you abandon your customers to hang in the wind. cPanel is already looking to the future. Is your plan to simply drag your feet?

I am honestly confused by your stance on this.

 

[IgorG]

I fail to see your plan for when CentOS is discontinued. Is your goal only to be glad you have one less OS to support? It seems very shortsighted.

Those people are going to migrate elsewhere and likely to another RPM-type package distro. At the moment, the time of this writing, besides Red Hat, which CentOS users were not paying for, to begin with, SUSE is the only stable mainstream alternative. It will be disappointing if you abandon your customers to hang in the wind. cPanel is already looking to the future. Is your plan to simply drag your feet?

I am honestly confused by your stance on this.

As I said already here, official information about the new supported OS will be published soon.

 

[Arch Linux]

As I said already here, official information about the new supported OS will be published soon.

AlmaLinux is new and is still unproven long-term. AlmaLinux OS

I would be interested in watching it mature before it was considered. I am not opposed to the possible adaptation in the future. I believe any new development that happens to spring up due to CentOS's demise must first prove itself over time.

I recognize that you are not suggesting AlmaLinux (I hope), but I feel whatever alternative the development team adopts, should be mature and comparable to what has been lost.

 

[weltonw]

The thing is, Alma migration is basically one DNF command from Centos. Should Alma fail, it'll likely be just as simple to migrate from Alma to rocky, or even oracle linux. You can't say the same for OpenSUSE

 

[valentim]

OpenSUSE have a lot of users, one of the reason why it's not one of the most used distro is because applications like Plesk, people choose that and not the OS itself, if they make it available for OpenSUSE, the distro will became more popular with time, maybe not as much as CentOS is/was, but high probability to be more than Alma ever will.

Another thing in mind should be the amount the reliability, all the time and money that was used into CentOS was just lost nowadays, at least we know that's almost impossible to OpenSUSE just vanish like CentOS, so the company will have a good ROI one day, the same cannot be said about Alma, for instance.