Spotfire Ideas Portal
Background and current support
Historically, we supported SUSE/OpenSUSE for the deployment of the Spotfire Server. But note that SUSE/OpenSUSE has never been supported for Spotfire Web Player or Automation Services.
We removed the support of SUSE/OpenSUSE for the Spotfire Server in 14.5.0. This decision was about the consolidation across all Spotfire services.
There are many operating systems. Spotfire focuses on the most common ones used for enterprise deployments. We support the 3 most used Linux distributions: Debian, Ubuntu and RHEL.
Container images considerations
Note also that, when moving into Linux deployments, most people want to directly consume the prebuilt official containers from the vendor, which we are providing from 14.5.
On top of that, when running any application on containers, how the image has been built (the base image) less important, what matters is the application certified by the vendor.
The main point of containerized applications is to provide just the application and the required dependencies.
An astonishing majority of the official container images, from software vendors, Docker hub or open source projects like the ones in the CNCF landscape, are using Debian/Ubuntu/Alpine base images, or built from scratch.
Most of the time, customers consume official images directly from the vendor, in whichever the base image distro the vendor provides. That is one of the main points of using containers, that you do not really need to focus on the OS, since you do not really have a full OS/distro running, just some base tools and libraries from a distro that are required by the contained application.
As an example, Microsoft provides instructions for deploying .NET on several operating systems. However, Microsoft publishes the .NET official container images in Docker Hub only for Debian, Ubuntu and Alpine Linux distributions. In a similar way, Spotfire provides installation packages and instructions for several OS. However, we publish container image recipes only for Debian.
Support issues are only accepted on supported software
Customers could probably run Spotfire on any Linux distribution they want (with all the caveats, and with some needed tweaking for example for installing software dependencies, since many distros belong to the Debian or RHEL family), but we will only be able to support them if they can reproduce the issue in a supported OS and the ticket is referring to that supported OS.