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New Financing And Fewer Staff @ SuSE

Posted by Hemos on from the keeping-on-moving dept.

jdfox writes: "According to this press release from SuSE, they have just received another 15 million Euros (about 14 million $US) venture capital, with some big names listed in the consortium's membership. They have also announced that a quarter of their 500 staff will be let go, following on from similar recent cuts. This excellent distro deserves to succeed: I hope this move will see them through the current slowdown." The upcoming release (needs babelfishing from German) of SuSE's version 7.3 promised for October 13th is loaded with a ton of goodies, too -- Kernel 2.4.10, KDE 2.2.1 and GNOME 1.4.1 beta2, among other things.

2 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. SuSE can't compete by sting3r · · Score: 0, Flamebait
    The SuSE approach to Linux distros is misguided and likely to blame for the poor financial shape of the company. Consider:

    • The everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to software. How many users choose SuSE just because the esoteric, useless package they need is provided as an rpm? It's probably not that many. Seriously, folks - how many users *actually need* five or six CDs of packages? Debian offers three but only the first is really required, unless you need something weird. But Debian doesn't have to pay the maintainers of the extraneous CDs; they're volunteers.
    • The crappy installer. It's proprietary and annoying. dselect or kpackage blows it out of the water. And the penguin looks like the ball he's sitting on is wedged up his behind. (cf "Take it Tux")
    • The fact that you need to cycle through each of the 5-6 installation CDs for a standard install. It completely defies reason.
    • The silly, unprofessional prompts. "Have a lot of fun!" Is this really from a serious company that wants to make money? I showed it to my boss and he thought it was a joke (like the "redneck" dialect in RH 4 - which actually was funny).
    • Beeping right before rebooting the system. Again, it serves no useful purpose and only annoys your office mates.

    I'm sure there are plenty of other reasons. SuSE is losing customers because Debian, Mandrake, and even Redhat have replaced it for all practical purposes. The only good thing about SuSE is that the company supports some very nice projects (such as ReiserFS) - and for that I will be sad to see it go.

    -sting3r

  2. Ahhh... SuSe the non-free Linux-distro by GC · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    My problem with SuSe is that I have not yet found a way to download ISOs of it's full installation.

    Because of this I am not prepared to leave the distribution that I have worked with for nearly seven years (here).

    I've heard a lot of good things about SuSe, but as Linux can be a finneckety thing to get used to I am not prepared to spend money on it until I know what it's like, including exactly what packages come with it. (I'm a bit stubborn when it comes to console text editors... hear that, Patrick?)

    I'm not a Linux freeloader - I've pumped more money into Slackware than I have Windows, and I'm proud of it.

    But until SuSe join the Open Source Revolution it's unlikely that they'll be seeing my $