Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop

[Rainmaker]

Hi guys,

Although I liked the general look and feel of OpenSUSE (and used it for a few weeks last year), I soon got sick of the relatively buggy nature of it and binned it off in favour of CentOS and Fedora.

However I recently tried SLED and have to admit I really liked it. It's much more polished, smooth and integrated than OpenSUSE. Obviously that IS going to be the case no matter what, as SLED is the paid-for enterprise distro based around OpenSUSE's successes and failures.

But that's not a complete excuse, as Fedora is the perfectly fine disto upon which RHEL/CentOS are based (just like OpenSUSE <> SLED), and Fedora isn't anywhere near as bad as OpenSUSE (IMHO!!).

I installed SLED in VM and having got all codecs installed, binary Nvidia drivers working and all other stuff running flawlessly, I was so impressed I decided to buy a licence. Cue heart attack. I realise it's an enterprise distro but the pricing scheme came as a shock.

$50 PER YEAR per PC Considering they go out of their way to say how cheap SUSE is compared to MS (Vista + Office etc), I think that's rather misleading... "$50 operating system with a $500 attitude" they say...

But as you have to pay EVERY YEAR to keep SLED updated, it actually works out much more expensive than the expected life of any given MS OS. XP for example, at OEM, was (and is) relatively cheap and all updates are free. Compare the cost of OEM XP for 10 years, to 10 years of paying $50 pa to Novell?

Anyone have any more info on this? Have I read this all wrong? Novell's website seems pretty clear when you go to buy a licence that it needs updating yearly

Cheers, and TIA.

 

[Rainmaker]

Hi bigredshark,

Many thanks for the (obviously) well thought out reply Just a couple of questions; genuine questions at that - honestly not a dig or sarcasm.

1) I gave the 10 year figure as a round approximation of how long one might expect an edition of Windows to last (XP is nearly that and has some extended support left). You say enterprises operate on a 3 year replacement cycle - but replace the current OS with WHAT? Either carrying on the SLED subscription for more years (=my analogy stands up better) or to XP or a free distro? What?

2) The support thing I HADN'T factored in, and it's a great point. No arguments there

3) Last time I checked my favourite distro Fedora is a community distro just like Ubuntu. Although it's not a "beta" for RHEL it's certainly the case that the brightest and best (and most stable) from Fedora works its way into the next RHEL, not the other way around ("Fedora comes out of the development of RHEL and is possible because RHEL is paid for and can finance development.").

MYTH - Fedora is unstable and unreliable, just a testbed for bleeding-edge software

FACT - This misconception comes from two things:

1. RHEL is derived from Fedora every few releases.
2. Fedora has rapid releases, a short life-cycle, and a lot of new code.

As for the first item, this means that Red Hat uses Fedora as a platform to promote the development of new technology, some of which might end up in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, derivative distributions of Fedora and other Linux distributions. This does not mean that Fedora is a untested, it simply means that Fedora is a rapidly progressing platform...

You can read this from Fedora's own "Myths" page HERE
Cheers.