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New Financing And Fewer Staff @ SuSE
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.
While SuSE does have some good things going for it, whether or not it "deserves" to survive is a matter of natural selection in the marketplace. It might be the best damned Linux distro ever -- but if people don't buy it, it will go the way of other "deserving" but unsuccessful products.
Perhaps SuSE can persevere by gaining a rabid following that doggedly and vehemently defends "their" distribution in fora like Slashdot... zealotry can be a potent force for survival.
Me? I'm a distro agnostic; I've bought SuSE, and Red Hat, and Mandrake, and I've downloaded Debian, Slackware, and Mandrake (yes, again) for various projects. And that may be part of SuSE's problem: all distros have their good and bad points, but there isn't much in the way of overwhelming distinction.
For my stuff, I prefer Debian, Slackware, and Mandrake, depending on circumstances. Your mileage may vary -- and SuSE needs to get better mileage if it wants to be here in five years.
All about me
SuSE puts out a very nice mail server product (I'm running our 40 user office on it) using Cyrus IMAP, LDAP and IMP web access. So easy, all our netscape users get LDAP access via their netscape address book so our mail lists are centrally administrated and current. Upon ordering their server, I got a quick call from Suse customer support asking for input about things I'd like to see in their future products and asking for feedback regarding any problems I may have. Very responsive. Their linux distro is current and top notch. I've been using it exclusively for 6 months. The Yast utilities can make things VERY easy for newbies, but you can stick to the CLI and completely forego the Suse utilities entirely. I believe that they're getting major funding from IBM and Intel so those outfits can get into the server room on the IA-64 cpu's. Here's hoping this distro has legs...