"When CentOS 8 reaches its end-of-life, Red Hat will become something of an outlier among commercial Linux server developers, as the only one not making free version of their product available to users. Ubuntu Server is free for users to download and use, and a drop-in replacement for SUSE is available in a downstream community distribution, openSUSE Leap."
Sounds like a great opportunity for Ubuntu and SuSE to pick up market share as the CentOS replacement.
To me, OpenSuSE is a perfect balance between the fad-chasing Ubuntu and the glacial CentOS (well, the glacial RHEL now). It’s stable, does not break nearly as easily as Ubuntu, but is still more current than RH. I hope they manage to get some users from this fiasco.
I've been an OpenSuSE/Leap user for many years now and agree about the balance and stability. However there's still a pretty big gap between Leap and SLES (their enterprise distro) plus each Leap point release is only supported for 2 years (something like that).
Maybe it's better now, but there were a lot of packages available in Leap that weren't part of SLES. It's been a little while since I've last tried SLES - still super happy with Leap 15.2.
Aside from the pace of updates, are there any meaningful differences that new OpenSUSE users should be aware of? (I figured I'd switch from CentOS to Ubuntu, but I hadn't considered OpenSUSE).
Compared to CentOS, it is really easy to use common desktop environments. I can’t say about very niche ones, but I use XFCE, which works well out of the box. YaST is the convenient GUI where settings and some common tools are located. It is more than adequate: not perfect but much better than a myriad of small setup programs or the abomination that is whatever Windows does. The package manager (zypper in the command-line, or a YaST module for the GUI) is a bit different but not revolutionary and still RPM-based.
Compared to Ubuntu, it tends to be more conservative and better tested on server or workstation hardware. What finally drove me away from Ubuntu was a very painful episode when the SAS driver would freeze randomly about 4 times out of 10 when loading. It is also far less opinionated than Canonical regarding which desktop you should use. The main drawback is that OpenSUSE Leap is supported for 2 years, so no equivalent to Ubuntu’s LTS releases.
OpenSUSE also uses systemd, but this should not be a shock for someone coming from Red Hat. It works decently with nVidia’s proprietary driver. Well, as decently as this garbage can run, anyway. I haven’t tested Wayland, as AFAIK XFCE still requires X.
People I'm dealing with seem to be concerned that Canonical/SUSE might pull the same stunt. Personally I think the backlash RH have created is enough to discourage either company from following this path.
Sounds like a great opportunity for Ubuntu and SuSE to pick up market share as the CentOS replacement.