Adurbe was the first of many to submit the news that openSUSE (aka SUSE 10.0 Beta 1) is now available. The roadmap also includes some interesting information.
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Member since:2005-06-29
Fedora is not RedHat. I don't know why people don't understand that...
Suse is supported. Fedora is not, it happens to get some updates. People use Suse for work, preferably people only use Fedora to hack fedora and test it.
I was looking at the package list for Suse and here's what I noticed:
1.) They tend to use .0 KDE releases. KDE users are aware that in the 3.x.y series y=0 releases tend to be buggy.
2.) The beta is shipping with gtk 2.7. Now, maybe 2.8 is going to be released before suse 10.0; however they'll still be releasing a fresh and major change of GTK as stable. RedHat is using Gtk 2.4.y.
3.) Suse community will be shipping gcc 4.x.
4.) They're shipping Gnome 2.11 in the beta. It looks like Gnome 2.12 will barely beat Suse 10.0 stable.
They're pretty bleeding edge. Not quite as much as fedora: But frankly Fedora is not usable, I've tried 2, 3 and 4. I liked 2. 3 was unusable, and 4 wouldn't install. So far, Fedora 4 is the only distro that hasn't installed on my laptop: Slackware, Fedora 2,3, Kanotix, RHEL3, and 4 have all installed fine.
I'd hate to see Suse Community turn into another Fedora.
I suppose they may have as many people working on it as before. However, TMK the RedHat developers working on Fedora do it of their own accord now and not on the job. Which doesn't bother me, I don't see RedHat or Novell as wrong to run a community distribution: Bandwidth is a wonderful gift 
.
But yes, they can get this thing wholly on the community. The best reason not to would be that they'd lose control of it and it could quickly become useless to them.
But, from what Novell has done so far I think they're trying to do their own thing which is not, technically speaking, what Suse was doing. They're much more Gnome, they've hired Icaza, etc. So, I'm not sure that they care to have Suse as a product for that much longer. And, if they do want to get rid of it, shifting it to a new owner would be the responsible thing to do.
Member since:I'd hate to see Suse Community turn into another Fedora.
Well that is what's happening, except they're hopefully not making a few of the same mistakes that Red Hat made with Fedora. They're not dropping their boxed product, which at least offers limited support, and hopefully means a more stable product. And hopefully SUSE will continue to have a longer security lifecycle. But the fact is we just don't know.
I suppose they may have as many people working on it as before. However, TMK the RedHat developers working on Fedora do it of their own accord now and not on the job.
This just isn't true.
But, from what Novell has done so far I think they're trying to do their own thing which is not, technically speaking, what Suse was doing. They're much more Gnome, they've hired Icaza, etc.
This is just silly, and I'm not going to follow you into yet-another-pointless-desktop-flamefest. I think this move is exactly the parallel to Fedora - they needed a good development base for the future of their SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, just as Red Hat needed a good base for RHEL. There's no real money in low-end retail Linux, so why not open up the product and spread it far and wide, as they've both done. SLES is a solid and profitable product in its own right, but it's also the foundation for Novell Linux Desktop (which like all enterprise desktop Linux solutions so far has been a commercial dud) and, more importantly, Novell Open Enterprise Server - their migration path for Netware and, quite frankly, the product they've bet the company on. The product they bet the company on requires a strong SLES beneath it! I think Novell has done just fine by SUSE so far, and while this has very little to do with their profit center, they've done just fine by both major desktop camps as well.
Member since:Fedora is not RedHat. I don't know why people don't understand that...
Suse is supported. Fedora is not, it happens to get some updates. People use Suse for work, preferably people only use Fedora to hack fedora and test it.
As I said in my follow-up post, since the person said "Red Hat" I wasn't sure if they meant RHEL or Fedora.
As for SUSE vs. Fedora... Just how stable SUSE is now going to be, we just don't know. We're both hopeful, but hope and $4.75 gets you a cup of coffee at Starbucks.
Compare these two charts, one from Novell explaining the differences between SLP and SLES (this long pre-dates the openSUSE move), and one from Red Hat explaining the differences between Fedora and RHEL. They're more alike than you might think. Notice that Novell shows security support as "limited" and offers no lifecycle guarantee. While in practice, SLP has been a much more stable product, and we hope this will remain unchanged since they plan to keep the boxed product, the truth is nobody really knows yet. We don't even know how long the lifecycle is yet (security patch lifetime).
http://www.novell.com/products/linuxprofessional/comparative.html
http://fedora.redhat.com/about/rhel.html
Member since:
1.) It's community supported: Novell probably wants to lay people off.
Just as Fedora Core remains 99.9% the work of people paid by Red Hat, so will SUSE for at least quite a while. If anything, opening up the development process and infrastructure creates more work, not less. I certainly hope nobody sold this to their boss as "let's open up development and the community will do the work for us!" because history shows us that it doesn't work that way. I think they realize there are costs and benefits to this. One benefit is getting a lot more people using and (hopefully eventually hacking on) SUSE, same goal as Fedora.
3.) Very.. RedHat is stable, Suse is bleeding edge.
By what metric? Fedora and SUSE will now have comparable release cycles and probably comparable lifecycles; if anything, odds are that SUSE will be more stable because they're keeping their supported, retail boxed product - which Red Hat dropped. But the truth is, we don't know yet.