SUSE Studio

» see susestudio.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The Studio team showed the thing in public for the first time at LinuxTag in 2008, ran an alpha through the spring of 2009, and launched it that July as a Novell product. The pitch was short enough to fit in a sentence. Open a browser, pick a base system plus the packages you want on top of it, then get back a bootable image.

That was a larger claim in 2009 than it reads now. Building a custom Linux image at the time meant a local toolchain, a machine you were willing to break, and an afternoon. SUSE Studio moved the whole job onto a web page and handed back whichever format you asked for. An ISO for burning, or a disk image a hypervisor could boot straight from.

It kept running through a decade of corporate reshuffling above it. Novell was bought by Attachmate in 2011 and Attachmate went into Micro Focus in 2014, while SUSE went on shipping the service under its own name the whole way through. The announcement came on 9 November 2017, and the online service stopped on 15 February 2018.

~ the record ~

~ kiwi underneath ~

The interesting part of SUSE Studio was that it was not a toy layer bolted onto a server farm. The image builder underneath was Kiwi, the production tool SUSE used to build SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 and openSUSE 11. A hobbyist clicking checkboxes on a web form in 2010 was driving the same engine that produced the vendor's own shipping distributions.

This is why the appliances came out usable rather than novelty-grade. You could point it at your own repositories and drop in your own RPMs, script what happened on first boot, then hand the result to somebody as a finished product.

~ testdrive ~

The feature people remembered was Testdrive. You built an appliance and then ran it, live, in a browser window, on SUSE's hardware, without downloading a single byte first. In 2009 that was close to a magic trick. The normal loop went: build it, download several hundred megabytes over whatever line you had, write the thing to media, reboot a machine. Then discover you had forgotten a package and start over.

~ absorbed into obs ~

SUSE Studio was retired by consolidation rather than by neglect. The Open Build Service had grown into the place where SUSE packaged everything, and running a second image pipeline beside it stopped making sense, so the Studio front end was rebuilt on top of OBS and released as SUSE Studio Express. The data-center edition, SUSE Studio Onsite, got its own end-of-support notice for 31 March 2019.

I was finishing a computer engineering degree in the years this launched, on a TTNet line at home. Getting a Linux onto a machine then meant an ISO you downloaded overnight plus a disc you burned. What SUSE Studio was selling was the deletion of that overnight. It is a small thing to build a memorial around until you remember how much of the 2000s was spent watching a progress bar for an operating system you had not yet decided to keep.

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