SUSE originated in Germany, where it’s just the normal pronunciation. “Suse” also pre-existed as a nickname for “Susanne” (of course, the company name was derived from an acronym which isn’t used anymore).

The issue comes in when non-Germans, especially English-language natives try to pronounce the word. English pronunciation is incredibly inconsistent. Hence English speakers tend to fail (very confidently) when pronouncing foreign-language words.

(Fwiw, Germans and many others don’t know anything about the silent G in “gnome” and will happily pronounce GNOME the way the project intends without being told. Similar things are true for Linux.)

If I hear a YouTuber pronounce it Lynux it immediately makes me skeptical of whatever they have to say

Unless it’s satire of course

I guess Linux projects tend to come from around the world, instead of US boardrooms and marketing desks.

Linux is Finnish, SUSE is German, so is KDE, Ubuntu is South African, GNOME is Mexican (?).

Damn foreigners with their weird pronunciations.

Linux variation is simply because it was named after a Finnish person but became mainstream in parts of the world that pronounce those letters differently.

There are recordings from the early days where Linus clearly says “I say Linux as LEE-nuhks”. That is consistent with how you say his name in Finland. So, some people seize on that.

More recently, Linus has said that his name is pronounced differently in different languages but that “Linux is always lin-nuhks”.

Based on that, I thinks his latter guidance is correct. It is also basically the way most people in North America say it by default in my experience. This makes sense as Linus now lives in the US.

Ubuntu is an actual African ( Zulu ) word. It has a proper pronunciation.