On Thu, 2007-03-01 at 14:48 +0000, Greg Thomas wrote:
Yesterday, I received a presentation on SLED - http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/
Is it me or does the presentation on the "View Demo" have the most completely bizarre pronunciation of "SUSE" ever ?
FWIW, I was dead impressed. OK, so underneath it all it's just another Linux distro, but it is really really nicely packaged. Yes, it's €47 pa (for support updates + support), but it's not aimed at the readers of this list - for the first time I really think there is a genuine enterprise ready alternative to Windows on the general user desktop.
I was up until a few years ago a big advocate of Suse, I used to religiously purchase every other release as boxed copy.
Certainly everything is pretty well polished and there is little doubt that YaST simplifies basic Admin for those not so familiar with Linux.
The only things that really stop me from still running it again are (in no specific order)
RPM. Once you have lived with apt you never want to go back to anything RPM based no matter how many fancy tools they wrap around it.
YaST. I like YaST and it really helps those not so familiar with Linux get the simple things working (file and printer sharing, firewall, remote access etc) but up until I stopped running Suse at home it really _hated_ any manual twiddling of configuration files.
Novell. I still am really unsure about Novell. If only because I will never forgive them for pulling the plug on what was looking to be the most viable alternative to Microsoft Small Business Server when they bought Suse.