back to article SUSE Linux Enterprise turns 15: Look, Ma! A common code base

SUSE today announced the impending release of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15, featuring a boatload of new toys and a leap in version numbering. The new release, which is based on version 4.12 of the Linux kernel and allows the use of a wider variety of hardware (such as new AMD and Intel chipsets, Arm SOCs, NVDIMM, crypto cards and …

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  1. iron Silver badge

    "SUSE was asked not to use these numbers by partners and customers alike."

    What kind of idiot is contacting their OS vendor and asking them not to use certain numbers? The juxtaposition of modern IT with moronic ancient superstition is mind boggling.

    1. Captain Scarlet Silver badge

      People with to much time on their hands.

    2. AdamWill

      not uncommon

      it's not uncommon at all. Where I live (Vancouver) there's a very big east Asian population...so my building has no floor 13 (western superstition) *or* floor 4, 14, or 24 (eastern superstition). Sure makes your buildings seem taller from the elevator...I bet it's a pain in the ass for the builders, though.

      In a sense it's more understandable than the western '13' superstition, because it's a linguistic thing: there's an element of superstition to it, but it also just feels uncomfortable even to a non-superstitious person to be saying something that sounds exactly like "death" all the time. It'd be like if your boss was called Deathy McMurderface or something. You *do* say the version number of the software you're using quite a lot.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: not uncommon

        I did point out to a passenger on an aeroplane once that, whatever the label said, she still *was* sitting on the 13th row counting from the front (on an A340, one of the two rows most likely to be taken out by a flying compressor blade in the event of an uncontained engine failure).

      2. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

        Re: not uncommon

        Yep.

        The hall of Residence where I stayed for my first year at Poly had a 13th floor. I was allocated a room on it. None of the Americans would take a room on the 13th floor.

        Some would not even visit the floor and one crossed herself if the lift stopped she was on stopped at the 13th floor.

        Even the street I lived on in the USA went from a 1200 block to the 1400 block.

        Strange people those Yanks.

        1. Flakk
          Joke

          Re: not uncommon

          Strange people those Yanks.

          Yep. Way stranger than those folk that customarily offer salutes and salutations to birds.

        2. Boo Radley

          Re: not uncommon

          I reside very happily in the 13th apartment in my building, even though my landlord numbered it 14. I also drive a taxi numbered 13. It's the only one in our fleet that hasn't had an accident

        3. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

          Re: not uncommon

          None of the Americans would take a room on the 13th floor.

          How many Americans were there? The triskadecaphobic thing is somewhat common in the US, I suppose - though I don't think I've ever met anyone who admitted to it - but it's hardly universal. Most of the people I know treat it as a joke.

          And then, in fine untenable fashion, we have the "baker's dozen", which has positive connotations. Even though it's the same number.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: not uncommon

        Clearly, all vendors should avoid version numbers containing "six", because it sounds like "sex". Just think of the CHILDREN!

        1. anonymous boring coward Silver badge

          Re: not uncommon

          "Clearly, all vendors should avoid version numbers containing "six", because it sounds like "sex""

          Oddly enough, in Swedish the word for six and sex is just "sex" -spelled the same and pronounced the same. Never caused a problem, or embarrassed anyone.

      4. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: not uncommon

        > it's not uncommon at all. Where I live (Vancouver) there's a very big east Asian population...so my building has no floor 13

        That's so wrong. If immigrants choose to live in your country, they should better change their lifestyle and adhere to local unwritten/written rules and really integrate with local people.

        But what happens more and more is the opposite, ghettos of non-integrated immigrants that import their uncommon lifestyles. Why should cafeterias change their meals? Why should building re-number their floors? WTF. Try to not-adhere to local rules in China, in India, in Syria, you will get into a lot of trouble in no time. But in western world, it's different. SJW/Inclusion spreads like a brainwashing disease. Disgusting. And even speaking about it, isn't allowed anymore.

        1. anonymous boring coward Silver badge

          Re: not uncommon

          "That's so wrong. If immigrants choose to live in your country, they should better change their lifestyle and adhere to local unwritten/written rules and really integrate with local people."

          Sure. What is the opinion of the native Americans on the subject of floor labelling?

          1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

            Re: not uncommon

            What is the opinion of the native Americans on the subject of floor labeling?

            Depends whether you're talking multi-level tipi, wikiup, longhouse, .... With hundreds of indigenous American ethnic groups, you'll get lots of different customs, mores, superstitions, and so on. As I'm sure you know - but it shows how foolish the GP's rant was. Even with the homogenizing effects of mass media and widespread travel there are hundreds of distinct local customs and the like just in the US.

            (And, frankly, anyone who eats in the US today should be really, really happy that we didn't stick with either native cuisine or what the initial European settlers brought with them.)

            But then the AC you were responding to is clearly an ideologue uninterested in actual facts or reason, as all of this is prima facie obvious.

          2. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: not uncommon

            > Sure. What is the opinion of the native Americans on the subject of floor labelling?

            You would think different if you weren't one of these immigrants abusing the local health system and destroying perfectly fine neighborhoods. Better respect the local community.

          3. AdamWill

            Re: not uncommon

            Around here they're called First Nations :P But yes, exactly what I would've riposted. (Along with noting that Chinese immigration to the western seaboard of North America dates back pretty nearly as far as European immigration here does...)

        2. Steve the Cynic

          Re: not uncommon

          But what happens more and more is the opposite, ghettos of non-integrated immigrants that import their uncommon lifestyles.

          More and more? What? No. It has always been like that. Why do you think that districts like "Chinatown" and "Little Italy" get their names?

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: not uncommon

            > ghettos of non-integrated immigrants that import their uncommon lifestyles.

            Yes I was also shocked and horrified about what goes on in expat compounds in Saudi Arabia.

            We should all have been praying five times a day and abstaining from alcohol, eh? Ah, no I forgot! We were there to help those stupid locals who would all be herding camels if it weren't for the infinite kindness of our hearts (money? what money?)

            It really is a testament to the resilience of nature that some people actually manage to be born, live to adulthood and even operate a keyboard sufficiently to advertise their lack of intellect, courage, empathy and moral fibre by parroting such twaddle.

        3. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: not uncommon

          > If immigrants choose to live in your country

          Not all of us are rich enough to afford our own country, so we have to share one with a bunch of other people, with whom we try to get along. Occasionally we start new countries or change old ones but then again, that's no longer a one-person affair these days.

          Of course, if I did have a country of my own, I would be very happy to have people come live in it. It'd be pretty hard work to run the bastard otherwise, not to mention the loneliness.

    3. Sureo

      "moronic ancient superstition"

      Ha ha ..... my upvote made the count 13 !!

      1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        Re: "moronic ancient superstition"

        Ha ha ..... my upvote made the count 13 !!

        You fool, you've doomed us all. I wager not one reader of this forum will survive the millennium.

        (If I'm wrong, let me know in 3001 and I'll send you a Dogecoin, which I believe will be the common currency then.)

    4. choleric

      It's understandable. I will never touch another product named ME after being burned by a certain Microsoft product released in the year 2000. Now that was a real y2k bug.

      If Linus ever considers releasing a Linux ME version I, for one, would shoo^H^H^Hend him lots of emails asking him very politely (in Linus Standard Politeness mode) to reconsider.

    5. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      > The juxtaposition of modern IT with moronic ancient superstition is mind boggling.

      Ah yes, whereas the hardware "rule" known to all Reg readers that one NEVER closes up a system one is working on until AFTER booting it at least once, or there will be some unexpected problem is scientifically proven, showing that million to one chances occur nine out of ten times. (TM SirTP)

      1. AMBxx Silver badge

        My parents ran a hotel in Wales when I was in my teens. Room 13 was difficult to book. Changed the room numbering to exclude 13, problem over.

    6. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: SuSE Linux

      I still have a SuSE Linux book that came with a CD of SuSE 7.3. Oh, it was so nice. KDE 2 looked like Win 9x, installation was a brise (except for formatting the HDD). Sound worked out of the box. The only issue was the 56k modem. M$ had deals with modem manufactorers, and many models were WinModems, meaning half of the modem was in the Windows software driver, a DRM in the late 1990s. But the helpful forums provided a solution to getting the 56k modem to work too. Unfortunately, Novell bought SuSE and destroyed StarOffice and SuSE and itself. Then Apache destroyed OpenOffice. So nowadays there is thanks god LibreOffice. And SuSE is sponsored by M$, so better not trust them with your data. And KDE 4/5 and Gnome 3 got shit. So there is only Gnome2 aka MATE left as sane Linux desktop - thank you M$ for the inside job.

      1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

        Re: SuSE Linux

        I'm pretty sure StarOffice was bought by Sun, not SuSE, and they then took out any propriety licensed software (I believe that the biggest item was the Adabase databse component) to create the open source OpenOffice product. StarOffice (with the database component) remained a product that Sun would sell, at least for a while.

        Oracle then upset the OpenOffice community by ignoring it after they bought Sun, which lead to the LibreOffice fork, and then Oracle, who had no real interest in OpenOffice, gave it to the Apache foundation.

        IBM took a fork of OpenOffice to try to produce a more compatible product (to MS Office), which I believe they called Lotus Symphony (although there had been a previous Lotus Symphony product, a spreadsheet on steriods in the '90s). Symphony died the same death as SmartSuite (which I actually quite liked) as a result of IBM apathy.

        I don't know where this actually leaves StartOffice. I guess it's still an Oracle product, but whether it is still available is an interesting question.

      2. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        Re: SuSE Linux

        And SuSE is sponsored by M$, so better not trust them with your data.

        SUSE is a division of Micro Focus. I don't know what sponsorship you're referring to (Microsoft isn't a current openSUSE sponsor, for example), but believe me, we give Microsoft a lot more money than we might get from them.

        It's been "SUSE" for years now. The mixed case was abandoned long ago.

    7. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      How about Windows skipping 'Windows 9'?

      Is 9 an unlucky number?

      1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

        Re: How about Windows skipping 'Windows 9'?

        Seven ate Nine.

        1. AMBxx Silver badge

          Re: How about Windows skipping 'Windows 9'?

          The problem wasn't the number 9. It was the German 'Nein' that was an obvious joke.

      2. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        Re: How about Windows skipping 'Windows 9'?

        Is 9 an unlucky number?

        In the case of Windows, not nearly so unlucky as 10. At least for users.

        (Just had my corporate Win10 Enterprise laptop do another unannounced forced reboot last night. Second time this week. Unforgivable.)

  2. DJV Silver badge

    I hope they don't find this site, otherwise a few more are likely to be omitted!

    https://sottyreview.wordpress.com/2015/01/04/lucky-and-unlucky-numbers-from-around-the-world/

  3. Teiwaz

    Cultural cloning and diminishing returns

    Haven't the cultures that have developed negative associations with certain numbers thought of changing the word or pronunciation to remove the association.

    In the long run, it would be better than just black-balling certain numbers. That sort of thing tends to snowball, and sooner or later accountants are adding up numbers wrong to avoid bad luck and your economy inevitably tanks.

    This is the sort of thing that happens when a formerly rich cultural set of traditions gets the Daily papers Star Sign treatment and reduced to Idiocracy levels of association. Reminds me of someone I knew who dabbled with the Tarot and only ever used the 22 Major Arcana (leaving out the 56 odd Minor Arcana) and then freaked herself out because 'the cards were following her around' or somesuch....

    1. MacroRodent

      Re: Cultural cloning and diminishing returns

      only ever used the 22 Major Arcana

      But they have the cool pictures in every deck! In most Tarot decks, the minor arcana are boring, like normal playing cards, but with a different set of four symbols.

    2. Justicesays
      Meh

      Re: Cultural cloning and diminishing returns

      Ancient wise man 1: so, that's counting sorted out then

      one, two three, death, five, six ...

      Ancient wise man 2: I'm sorry, three, what?

      AW1: Death.

      AW2: Why is it one two three, then death?

      AW1: It's just what we came up with. Of course, probably people will try to avoid having "Death" amounts of things I suppose, maybe a little creepy, but what can you do eh? Anyway.,

      Seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, deathteen, fifteen.

      AW2: Erm, deathteen?

      AW1: Well, we have to be consistent, otherwise people would get confused. We also have twenty-death, thirty-death and my favourite, deathty-death.

      .....

      Try to imagine it in a Mitchell and web style.

      1. TonyJ

        Re: Cultural cloning and diminishing returns

        "...Try to imagine it in a Mitchell and web style..."

        More of a Pratchett style, to be fair

        1. anonymous boring coward Silver badge

          Re: Cultural cloning and diminishing returns

          "More of a Pratchett style, to be fair"

          The problem with imagining it in a Pratchett style is that you'd have to imagine it in a style you have to imagine -which is fine by me, but can cause some confusion.

    3. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      Re: Cultural cloning and diminishing returns

      Haven't the cultures that have developed negative associations with certain numbers thought of changing the word or pronunciation to remove the association.

      What's fascinating is that this got two upvotes. Apparently we have at least three forum participants who have no understanding of what a culture is, or how one works.

      I do like the prediction of economic doom, though. That's the most hyperbolic snowball argument I've seen in some time.

  4. stizzleswick

    *snore*

    So yet another item has been re-numberd because of superstition. There is a long tradition to that. SuSE have to make customers happy. If those customers are superstitious, OK, it's just numbers. They could have numbered their releases 12a and 12b, then 15, as some hotels do with their floors. For me, it's ridiculous and superstition. SuSE have to earn money to keep up the (IMHO very good) work, so if they scratch the bellies of a few superstitious people, I can live with that. Don't mock SuSE for that, it was not their idea. Other manufacturers do the same thing, too (IBM once forewent naming a product "Gnome," e.g., for the same reason, and to my best knowledge, both Sony and Huawai have avoided the number 14 in any product so far).

    *shrug* So long as the product does what it is supposed to do, I could not give a rodent's behind, really. I want stuff that works, and so long as it does what I expect it to do, I really, really, really, really, really [repeat about 2 million times] don't care what the name/version number is.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    numbering

    It's no sillier than say (h/t the ghost of Sun):

    SunOS 4.1.3

    SunOS 4.1.4

    Solaris 2.0 << but really, SunOS 5 under the covers. Except that SunOS 5 was a totally different beast to SunOS 4.anything

    Solaris 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.6

    Solaris 7 << what just happened there? A rip in the fabric of space-time?

    Solaris 8, 9, <implosion>

    1. anonymous boring coward Silver badge

      Re: numbering

      And where is Windows 9? Come to think of it, where is Windows 4, 5 and 6?

      1. JulieM Silver badge

        Re: numbering

        There is some software out there that thinks any version string beginning with "Windows 9" is Windows 95 or 98, so this number was skipped on purpose.

        Windows 4 was NT4.

        Windows 5 was XP.

        Windows 6 was Vista.

    2. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

      Re: numbering

      Although, to be fair, Solaris was originally a software grouping title (a bit like how IBM package multiple software under the WebSphere, Tivoli and now Spectrum brands) which contained SunOS 5, along with a variety of other software packages.

      I think you're right that Solaris 2 was the point at which the OS generally got to be referred to as Solaris.

      I believe the break between SunOS 4.x and SunOS 5 was when Sun decided to separate SunOS from SVR4 after UNIX System Laboratories (USL) was wound up. This allowed them to take back complete control over the internals of SunOS.

  6. Neil Barnes Silver badge
    Headmaster

    Pentium

    Perhaps *that's* what happened: the Pentium-that-couldn't-get-the-numbers-right was actually doing its best to save us from our poor triskadecaphopic selves!

  7. Rainer

    Luckily, it's just a number

    They don't really mean anything anymore.

    The floor, gate, train renumbering is absurd though.

    At least, we've still got Tram 13 here. And my street has a house number 13 (I live in 15).

  8. vagabondo

    Numbering Wind-Up

    The version numbering “quote” is just a wind-up.

    SLE-15 gets its name from its shared codebase with the openSUSE Leap-15 distribution.

    openSUSE skipped a version 14, and went from 13.2 to Leap-42.1 as an anniversary homage to “the answer to everything”. The first S.u.S.E release was numbered 4.2 for similar reasons.

  9. the Jim bloke
    Pirate

    Homophone Pride

    Our family doctor when I was a child had the name Dr Deith.

    He had changed it after leaving Germany.. from Todt

    This was all a very long time ago, and I am reconstructing a fair bit.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Homophone Pride

      I'm pretty sure that a previous surgery I went to, there was a Doctor <a href="http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/De%27ath>De'Ath</a>

      1. DJV Silver badge
  10. anonymous boring coward Silver badge

    "Based on an ad hoc survey of customers at the SUSE Expert Forum, SUSE reckons that around half of users will likely make the jump to the new version over the next 12 months."

    So they aren't planning to have it install automatically if you close an obscure dialogue window by hitting the "X" then?

  11. Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
    Joke

    Enough of these numerical gimmicks, I am off to lecture in Room 3B

    Doffs hat to the late, great Sir Terry Pratchet

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