SUSE
More info
- Creator
- Roland Dyroff, Thomas Fehr, Burchard Steinbild, Hubert Mantel
- Released
- 1992
- Type
- Linux company
The German Linux company with the green chameleon: Europe's answer to Red Hat, and owner of more owners than most distributions have had releases.
Four students in Nuremberg founded Gesellschaft für Software- und System-Entwicklung in 1992. They started by selling a German translation of Slackware on floppies, then built their own distribution. The YaST configuration tool meant Linux could be administered without hand-editing every file, and SUSE became the default in German-speaking businesses. Packaging is RPM-based, driven today by zypper.
The owners in order: Novell (2004), Attachmate (2011), Micro Focus (2014), EQT (2019), a Frankfurt listing in 2021, then back to EQT in 2023. The commercial SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) is a fixture on mainframes and under SAP deployments, and the community runs openSUSE. Both have long shipped Btrfs as the default filesystem.