Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 3rd Aug 2005 09:39 UTC, submitted by sonic1001
Novell will be launching a community-based Linux distribution, OpenSuSE, at next week's LinuxWorld in San Francisco, according to sources close to the company. Following in the footsteps of Red Hat Inc. with its successful Fedora Project Linux distribution, Novell Inc. will be opening up its Linux development efforts with OpenSuSE, sources said.
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RE: interesting...could be good or bad
by Anonymous Penguin on Wed 3rd Aug 2005 14:59
in reply to "interesting...could be good or bad"
Member since:2005-07-06
Very well said. I wanted to say something very similar myself.
SUSE and Ubuntu can't be compared in any way, they are two different beasts altogether: Ubuntu is little more than an installer, and not a very easy one at that.
SUSE is a complete OS, you can use it as a desktop, as a server...(and out of the box). All the commercial apps come already bundled and it is very well suited for a new user.
True, its multimedia and P2P support are very lacking, but use APT and you'll get an amazing amount of extra apps.
Making a community project out of it could make SUSE an absolute killer within a couple of years.
RE[2]: interesting...could be good or bad
by matthew_i on Wed 3rd Aug 2005 20:32
in reply to "RE: interesting...could be good or bad"
Member since:2005-07-14
Member since:
2005-07-13
It will be interesting to see what happens. I spent a whole lot of time testing out various Linux distros in the last year to see what would be the best to recommend to non-technical folks interested in a Windows alternative. SUSE was my favorite, followed by Ubuntu. I just installed SUSE 9.3, and am even more impressed. The main reasons I prefer SUSE (including over Ubuntu, though I haven't tried Kubuntu):
- Perhaps most importantly, it is a complete desktop distro that includes Flash Player, RealPlayer, and mp3 support out of the box. Non-technical users would find the process of installing these technologies pretty daunting (in some cases difficult enough to prevent their use of the distro), and might not even know where to look to get started; and most users (including me) will not see the reasoning behind not including them as worthwhile.
- It has the most polished look & feel of any desktop distro I tried. This was true of 9.2 and even more true of 9.3. This is especially important today, as Linux is still struggling to be seen as a viable alternative OS for everyday users: If it looks polished people are more likely to take it seriously. (While I do think SUSE wins in this regard, Hoary is a vast improvement over Warty here.)
- Its toolset is more consistent and complete than most. I find that configuring a Hoary system, for example, requires some command-line work while SUSE generally has a YaST or KDE Control Center module. Not a critical difference for seasoned Linux users but certainly important for the average desktop user.
- Its default settings will be comfortable for the Windows switcher without simply cloning Windows.
All that said, not all distros will work smoothly on all hardware, so having more than one recommendation is a good idea, and there's no question Ubuntu is a nice, easy-to-use distro.
What worries me about this move is that there are aspects of SUSE that make it a good distro and seem to go hand in hand with it being somewhat commercial (though you can still download it), most notably the support for Flash and mp3. It would be sad if, like Fedora, this community SUSE became the leading edge of SUSE but lost some of what makes it a good choice for new users.