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SuSE Linux Desktop 1.0 Reviewed
LinuxLasVegas writes "SuSE announced a new release today titled "SuSE Linux Desktop 1.0". The distro is built on SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8.x technology and comes with Crossover Office 2.0. Mad Penguin has the first review of this release. From what I read, it seems like a good release, but for the $600 price tag, I'm not sure if it would be worth the jump..."
I don't care about the price tag as much as I care about the philosophy. OSS is primarily about free as in speech, not free as in beer. Same as Red Hat Enterprise, the price tag allows them to offer you support and stability, things they don't have the financial resources to provide without charging for the service.
This is aimed at the enterprise customer who is looking for culpability in their vendors and a certain level of support. Hats off to them... I hope Linux becomes a profitable offering for the vendors pursuing it.
--madgeorge
Well, to a certain extent, you're right.
Corporate users and decision-makers are particularly averse to "free" things, because of the perception that things that are free come with some sort of gimmick, trick, or legal gotcha.
Offering the same product to them at a sizeable price tag (it looks like the OS itself is $99, whereas the maintenance add-on is $500 more) gives the illusion of value, or addition, or more importantly, accountability.
In the corporate world, it's all about who you can blame when the shit hits the fan. If your whole windows network goes down, and your group loses 5 days of work time, you can say "microsoft is to blame! sue them!" and your boss doesn't fire you. If your whole *nix network goes down, and you downloaded the OS for free, you have no one to blame, and you get a pink slip.
The most important piece of the SuSE corporate invasion is the fact that decision-makers now have someone to call or point the finger at when something goes wrong.
--My other sig is a ferrari.
As a german I can only agree, it's kind of a leftover IBM mentality of sorts. Profesisonal solutions are only acceptable if they're expensive and they have to come from megalomaniac companies. If it doesn't cost enough, it can't be worth very much...
But SuSE is not one of those companies! Actually, the cited 600,00 price is for a package including support costs for five clients for a year, so you'll find that for an office solution it isn't that expensive. (But I would still prefer the "normal" 8.2 version.)
Everybody is screaming about the price, but its actually not that bad. Obviously SuSE isn't expecting people to go out and buy this instead of their regular linux for the home.
If you wanted to install Windows XP Pro and Office XP on five computers, you can bet its going to cost you a whole lot more than 600 dollars.
All thats left is to see if it works well enough to be worth the money.. I'd say for a business looking for stability and an identical setup on multiple computers, this is perfect.
For at least some of a companies machines, this is very welcome.
CrossOver Office needs to fix some things as the author states, the screen shot of the menu looks plain stupid.
Yea, I need Exchange and it's not there, hope that gets fixed. I've had problems with kmail and authentication schemes as well.
I'd prefer if only ONE browser was presented, preferably mozilla and that anything calling ANY DAMN THING on the web used that one browser. Different browsers confuse some (most) windows users and can be just enough to cause them not to choose the entire OS. Hell even keyboard shortcuts can do that.
Is it MadPengs page that forces a jump back to top of page when you press the back button?
If I could find the time, I'd do a CrossOver Distro (hey crossover SELL THIS! And fix the menus!).
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty