[citation needed] The original idea was that the company would develop software and function as an advisory UNIX group.

[6] In the following years, SUSE opened a total of six national and four international (USA, Czech Republic, Great Britain and Italy) branches.

Linux 4.2, a reference to the answer to "The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything" from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

In 1997, SuSE, LLC was established under the direction of president and managing partner James Gray in Oakland, California, which enabled the company to develop Linux markets in the Americas and Asia.

While Red Hat was ubiquitous in the United States, SuSE Linux continued to grow in Germany as well as in Nordic countries such as Finland and Sweden.

[20] On 4 August 2005, Novell announced that the SUSE Professional series would become more open, with the launch of the openSUSE Project community.

SUSE Linux 10.0 included both open source and proprietary applications and retail boxed-set editions.

As part of the change, YaST Online Update server access became free for all SUSE Linux users, and also for the first time, the GNOME desktop was upgraded to equal status with the traditional KDE.

The resignation apparently stemmed from a dispute over the implementation of Ximian products in the GNOME-based default desktop environment for the Linux distribution.

The department said that, as originally proposed, the deal would jeopardize the ability of open source software, such as Linux, to continue to innovate and compete in the development and distribution of server, desktop, and mobile operating systems as well as middleware and virtualization products.

[31] Former president Nils Brauckmann was promoted to CEO and member of the Micro Focus Group board.

On 9 March 2017, SUSE announced the completion of its acquisition of assets relating to the OpenStack and Cloud Foundry products from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

[34] Development teams and code related to those products were to be used to expand SUSE's IaaS and PaaS capabilities.

On 2 July 2018, it was announced that Micro Focus would sell its SUSE business segment to Blitz 18-679 GmbH, a newly-created subsidiary of EQT AB, for $2.535 billion.

[40] On 8 July 2020, SUSE announced its definitive agreement to acquire Rancher Labs, which provides a Kubernetes management platform.

[41] The acquisition closed on 1 December 2020, at which time Rancher CEO and cofounder Sheng Liang became SUSE's President of Engineering and Innovation.

[44][45][46][47] On May 19, 2021, SUSE went public at Frankfurt Stock Exchange at an original issue price of 30 euros, with EQT AB retaining 75.7 percent.

On 28 October 2021, SUSE announced that it had acquired NeuVector, Inc., a provider of full lifecycle container security, for $130 million in cash and stock.

The company previously known as SUSE S.A. was merged with Marcel New Lux IV S.A., a Luxembourg Public Limited Liability Corporation.

[53] The initial public release of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server was version 7 published on Auagt 24th 2001.

SLES is available in both on-demand and bring-your-own-subscription ("BYOS") images on Amazon EC2,[59] Microsoft Azure,[60] and Google Compute Engine.

[61] SUSE Linux Enterprise Server has several optimized editions created in the context of the respective partnerships.

It allowed users to put together a custom Linux distribution graphically and to generate output including a large variety of Virtual Machine and Disk Images.