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SuSE CEO's Two-Distro World
FrankoBoy writes "CRN has an interview with SuSE CEO Richard Seibt in which he claims such things as 'Linux means two companies: Red Hat and SuSE, and nobody else.' Another example of this kind of corporatespeak can be found in another interview he did with ZDNet last week. DistroWatch has an article about all this in its current weekly newsletter."
SCO isn't a company. Debian and Gentoo aren't companies. Is Mandrake? Is there any other companies out there rolling their own distro?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Somehow I don't mind this kind of megalomaniacal self-important delusion when it's coming from a company like SUSE that actually has a meaningful, usable, well-crafted, well-supported product that time and effort was put into.
Oh well. To me, Linux still means "Debian and Gentoo, and maybe someday I'll consider trying SUSE, but probably not." Redhat and Mandrake are dead to me. ^_^
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
But I would leave out Red Hat and SuSE too. Linux doesn't "mean" any companies! Linux means a stable, reliable, nimble, free OS.
:)
Of course, my years of using and contributing to Debian (which is not a company) may have skewed my viewpoint somewhat.
And the Internet means two companies, AOL and MSN, nobody else.
It's my view that the industry has decided there is one main operating system competitor to Microsoft, and that is Linux. Linux means two companies: Red Hat and SuSE, and nobody else. There will be no third distribution that will be supported by the large IT vendors.
All he's saying is that in the corporate market most of the support is related to these two companies.
Personally I think he's wrong, but he's not trying to deny the existance of other distros or anything.
Does the general /. public know what is going with Novell and Ximian? (apart from the Netware admins). This is what one Netware admin had to say:
... This is a competitive advantage to Windows because this is not something you can get with [Windows].
Novell needs a new loading OS kernel to build Netware on. DOS certainly has reached it limitations with scalability and security so linux is an obvious solution. They'll still maintain their same environment and NDS tho. But scalability is their main push. E-Directory (NDS) loads on WinNT/2k/2K3 and linux.... but keeping it in its native environment is still the most stable of course.
And the CEO's answer to a question:
CRN: What do you think of Novell buying Ximian? Does this bode well for Linux adoption on the desktop? Seibt: I would take this as a fact that Novell is taking Linux very, very seriously, and it's another fact that they are not concerned about any lawsuit. They simply believe that Linux is something that is a huge value for the customer. Think about what CA [Computer Associates] just did. They did a survey with their customers about why customers are deploying Linux. [Customers] named five reasons: performance, reliability, scalability, security and total cost of ownership, which came in fifth. What does this mean? Everybody is talking about total cost of ownership, and no doubt this is very important, because all of us have to reduce IT budgets. But customers named four other reasons. These reasons are strategic reasons why to deploy Linux.
Well what?
Were gentoo zealots mentioned anywhere in the "most zealous zealot" poll?
I think they deserved their very own poll option.
I cant beleive that the guy said that linux is about suse and redhat . SuSe linux is surpased by a number of distributions out there. I am just shocked that SuSe would say that . I mean there are many many linux distributions out there and from a whole sort of community prespective SuSe is fairly low .
Companies. He's talking about companies. Name 3 companies that produce Linux. Red Hat, SuSE and Mandrake.
You also have apparently not used SuSE much, nor read all the articles about how popular it really is. It's the Red Hat of Europe, and Mandrake is taking all the scraps on the US and European markets.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
C'mon -- the guy is a non-native English speaker and the context makes it perfectly clear what he's saying. He said that from the perspective of commercial Unix vendors, there are two Linux distributions they actively consider.
I'm a Gentoo and Yellow Dog user, but the shrieking in just the first 10 comments is completely misplaced.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I'd still recommend SuSE to newbies regardless of this obvious corporate BS. In my opinion, SuSE is still a good distro. It has worked well for me. My only problem with SuSE is that they do not offer free ISO downloads (although they do have a Live evaluation CD and FTP installation). If they'd offer a free installable CD ISO I think more people would be willing to try their distro.
Smeghead every day of the week.
He's saying that as far as the corporate world goes, Linux == RedHat | SuSE. If you buy a pre-installed Linux box from some IT vendor somewhere, it will have RedHat or SuSE on it. This is basically true.
So don't jump the gun on tearing this guy a new asshole.
I'll stay with the turtle (Debian), 'cause we all know what happens at the end. The turtle poops all over the hare (SuSe). /me makey jokey joke/
/joeyo
2^5
Linux means two companies: Red Hat and SuSE, and nobody else. There will be no third distribution that will be supported by the large IT vendors.
Thats bullshit.
HP/Compaq bundles Mandrake.
And certifies systems for Redhat, SuSE, Mandrake, and TurboLinux.
If HP isn't considerd a "large IT vendor," who is?
The unofficial
There are always groups of people who swear Maxtor blows and WD never fails, or Redhat installs on any hardware and Mandrake does not work on any.
The bottom line is, most distros work on most hardware without significant problems. There will always be fanboys who cry for years because they had one or two bad experiences with a Distro.
Especially about red hat. Red hat is the closest to a profitable, properly run, professional company in the linux world. Suse is quite respectable too, and they have a great product to back it up. While other linux distros do matter, they don't show up on the professional radar for most people.
Arguing about whether or not to use GNU in your name, or which GUI is more "free" than the other is irrelevant to most companies. They want good products, not irrelevant nerd-speak. Red Hat and Suse have forged past the anarchistic free-for-all attitude of hackers and made Linux much more approachable. Anyone who says otherwise is probably just jealous of their success...
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
Granted there are all kinds of linux flavors and distro under the sun, but walking down the street in anytown USA you ask any given person "hay you ever heard of linux?" or "could you tell us the name of a linux distribution/company you have heard of?" and most common answers will be Redhat, Suse, and Mandrake - in that order.
Red Hat has pushed Linux into the spot light more than any other company has - ok this is where I get flamed - but honestly what companies other than Red Hat have targeted more than the fat-guru-programmer stereotype nix user. Gentoo and Slackware definaetly don't expect anyone but a power user to even touch there distros. Mandrake trys to be a friendly nix distro, but they constantly beg their users to donate money and can barely keep from going bankrupt. Red Hat and Suse are the only 2 companies that have successfully made money selling linux to both corporations and home users, and of the 2 Red Hat is by far more "KNOWN"
Ave Molech Setting
Even more interesting is when you consider SCO just hired an ex-SuSE VP of International Business, to be the VP of SCOSource.
And that McBride comes from being a VP at Novell...
The SCO Group Announces Appointment of Gregory Blepp
Debian/Gentoo vs. Redhat/Suse/Mandrake.
But then I realized he was referring to "companies". Linux is the way it is because it was made by people who care, and the same can be said (possibly to a lesser extent) about other unices(Linux walks, talks, and quacks like UNIX. So does BSD/QNX/etc.)
Don't get me wrong, I like nearly all Linux distros for the guts beneath them. I just prefer Debian over Redhat/Suse because of the complete lack of commercialization; I can get ALL of the available software in the same interface, with nothing held back "for paying customers".
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
It's my view that the industry has decided there is one main operating system competitor to Microsoft, and that is Linux. Linux means two companies: Red Hat and SuSE, and nobody else. There will be no third distribution that will be supported by the large IT vendors.
This kind of polarization is usual behaviour when you have several smaller opponents, as a example: political parties in "non-bipartidist" systems use it frequently.
I'm a chainsmokin' alcoholic sociopath, so-ci-o-path
> You also have apparently not used SuSE much, nor
> read all the articles about how popular it really > is. It's the Red Hat of Europe,
Really? well... we don't live in the same Europe because SuSE is nothing in the UK, nothing in France, nothing in Spain. While Mandrake is.
Sorry but Europe is not only Germany.
I think too much is being read into this comment. For one, it's obvious English is not this guy's first language from the text. Secondly, he seemed to be addressing Linux as it pertained to larger corporations. As far as large companies go, Suse and Red Hat likely ARE the only two distros they're really concerned with. They're the ones that have the parterships with the likes of IBM and Sun after all. He's not delusional - he's just not talking about what everyone seems to think he is.
"You can take our lives, but you can never take our Flerbage!!!!"
quote was taken out of context - SuSE's just saying that corporate IT is focusing on just two distributions.
Don't know about you - but I see very few other distributions out there on corporate boxes...
Okay, everybody calm down.
First of all, I really don't think that this interview was very interesting.
What seems to have gotten it onto Slashdot was his "only two distros" comment. However, what the person submitting the story left out was one minor detail: context.
He said HP, Sun, etc., are mostly backing off from pushing their own proprietary operating systems and opting to push Linux-based products. In that context, there are two highly relevant Linux distributions: Redhat and SuSE.
Can you name another distro with the resources to provide support to a major hardware vendor deploying Linux?
Isn't it amazing how much less interesting and inflammatory his comment seems with a little context surrounding it?
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
I'd be one of those new Gentoo users. I've been slowly transitioning over to it for about a week after having spent 3 years or so piddling with Mandrake and RedHat. (As a side note, I still feel that MDK is the best distro around for Linux newbs). I'm thoroughly impressed with it, and I can see why people have been making such a big deal out of Portage. I've come to feel that Gentoo is the perfect distro for the Newb++, as I've learned many things about Linux I had never known before venturing into this, despite considering myself an "intermediate" user.
:) I think it's this type of flexibility that attracts me to it - You can turn Gentoo into pretty much anything you want it to be.
Being able to start from Stage 1 really teaches you a lot about the system, while a Stage 3 (pre-compiled) install allows you to quickly deploy a system and take advantage of the Portage without waiting a full day for KDE to compile.
I think Gentoo is definitely going to be my distro of choice from now on.
Of course, Debian is a GNU/Linux distribution, and not a Linux distribution.
All he's saying is that in the corporate market most of the support is related to these two companies. Personally I think he's wrong, but he's not trying to deny the existance of other distros or anything.
If you look at this, it's wrong no matter how you interpret it. Literally, he left out a damned big company - IBM. Yes, they use Red Hat's stuff, but to say "Linux means two companies - Red Hat and SuSE, and nobody else" is just flat wrong on that basis.
If you want to be assume he meant distros, then obviously he left out like 50.
You would have to interpret that as "companies who release their own distros under their own name" for that to make any sense, but by that time, it's irrelevant. The major players aren't the companies making the distros, it's those like IBM getting it on machines. Among companies with distros, only Red Hat (not SuSE!) has had any real impact doing that. SuSE's penetration is far less, especially outside Deutschland.
So, to me, the only sense in which his statement is true is that in which it's barely relevant. Sorry to SuSE, but they have nowhere near the impact of Red Hat or IBM.
Ultimately, he's trying to sound as if SuSE is half of the non-MS world, and that's nowhere near the case
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
He's right, there are 2 linux business operating system companies now, Suse and Redhat. If I was to ask Dell, HP, or IBM if Mandrake ran on their servers, they'd say "Maybe but don't ask for it in writing", for Suse or RedHat you get an answer of "This range of servers are all certified to work with RedHat Advance Server and Suse Linux Enterprise Server"
If I want to buy some hardware + software, the only way to get a certified setup with Linux is to buy either Redhat or Suses server products at about $1000. For people running large Oracle or DB2 databases on IBM xSeries or Dell Poweredge servers, this is what they need.
His quote carries on with "There will be no third distribution that will be supported by the large IT vendors". I saw HP were supporting Debian while Bruce Perens was there, but now looking on the HP site everywhere it is RedHat or Suse.
There's definitely going to be more desktop linux vendors, but a lot of them still ride on top of Redhat or Debian, and again a lot of them cater for specific markets.
The funny thing is that I actually did try Suse the other day. I downloaded and burned their "Live CD" as part of a lecture. I was very impressed at how well it worked. It really was a no fuss deal. Like you I'll put up with a little meglomania for that. What harm can he really do to free softare? Who really needs large IT vendors? The future is free.
He also says lots of good stuff too. He slams SCO and easily dances around all their FUD. He's creating value and sees himself as a big institutional player. Good for him. No free softare based system can be as ugly or as abusive as Microsoft was.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Because I like rsync and python scripts more than CVS and makefile hacks? And I like running stuff on my embedded MIPS and PowerPC. Which leaves me with NetBSD. Of course netbsd doesn't use ports by default, so now the user has to figure out how to "upgrade" NetBSD with ports. When FreeBSD installs cleanly on my ibook maybe I'll try it. For now I'll stick with Gentoo and NetBSD.
:)
Also, please don't lump FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD together, as if they were just different distros of the same thing. (well maybe NetBSD and OpenBSD).
These three BSDs are infact all very mature forks of very old version of software. They have evolved, for the most part, indepedently. There is a lot of trading between the groups, but Linux takes stuff out of NetBSD too.
Of course ports is available in Linux too. If you feel up to installing them. Gentoo portage does a few things that bsd ports does not, although one could argue that the features of portage are not features at all but bad design.
The *BSD crowd, especially FreeBSD crowd are pretty sore about Linux being more popular. What also really hurts is the 1-way street for sourcecode. Linux can grab things out of a BSD, but a BSD can't grab things out of Linux, all due to the nasty icky GPL.
Of course my own OS is public domain, so I hate BOTH the Linux and BSD people because you'll be able to steal from my OS and I won't be able to use stuff from your OS. You all are terrible bastards.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
So, lookes like SeSE has found SCO's secret stash, and/or borrowed Steve Jobs's reality distortion field.
Mandrake makes a decent all-around box (server or desktop), Slackware makes a great server, Debian has its' following, etc.
It doesn't matter whether Red Hat and SUSE are most popular right now, maybe they deserve to be.
What's most important is that with Linux there is no way that they can prevent any other company that decides to step up and bring a distro to market.
This fact will keep them on their toes via the omnipresent shadow of the unknown competitor just around the corner and it means that even if they decide to abandon Linux ten years from now, any of the other distros can come in a take up the slack.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
I have to agree with you on just about everything. Gentoo, I have found, has one of the nicest installs I have seen (while my linux experiences are not as high as I would like (I'm more of a BSD fan, myself)). It was fairly easy, and you don't install anything (almost, there are a couple things like nano already installed, IIRC)that you don't tell it to. It's plenty stable, and fast. It's pretty much the only linux distro that I have found to be worthy of having installed on a computer. But, all in all, I've found OpenBSD to be one of the nicest installs. It doesn't install anything at all that you don't specify, it's *very* secure and very stable. But, those are really all my opinions.
Are you telling me that you don't see the connection between government and laughing at people? - Interviewer
Admittedly, this guy is leaning out of the window here. However, the industry -- in this case meaning not computer vendors but IT companies wanting to use computers for administrating/performing their work, is so far used to Windows, and may not always be forgiving when it comes to quirks that geek distros like Debian, Gentoo and Slackware tend to have. While in the hands of a dedicated power user, these may be far superior to SuSE and RedHat, in the hands of even a computer-experienced, intelligent linux-newbie, they bomb.
Having appeased the geeks (I like Debian a great deal, trust me), what does SuSE(my current OS) have to offer? Easy, smooth installation, flawless autodetection -- as far as I know -- and an acceptable configuration tool in the form of YaST. On first boot, you get a good KDE install, with the important stuff, like OpenOffice and such integrated, good menu structure and MIME type settings. SuSE's weakest points are lack of SuSE rpms for a lot of programs, and the fact that changes to configuration files may be overwritten by SuSEconfig, which runs after every major system change. However, for someone who either wants a smoothly running system, or is proficient enough to disable SuSEconfig and compile some programs themselves, SuSE is quite a nice distro. For those reasons, it may be much more attractive for companies than tweak distros.
Divide et impera!
While many vendors do support other distributions than the big two (RH & SuSE) this is mostly on the desktop. Support on the server side for large servers is pretty much restricted to these two. This is true for hardware also If you want support for larger SMP's, SAN, etc there are not many drivers for other distros. Usually you can just go ahead and try, but if something does not work the support line will tell you to replace your distro xxx with RH/SuSE where thei support it.
I've been involved in quite a few new Linux customer projects. All the time third party software (Oracle, SAP, DB2, etc) was involved as well. The only distros which are *certified* to run this stuff are Rh and SuSE. And customers do want certified installations !
Personally I'm happily running debian and gentoo, but I haven't come across commercial installation of these distributions yet.
Markus
according to netcraft, if linux means 2 things, it is RedHat and Debian :)
Can anyone speculate why scox stock is up 21% today (to 12.66)?
I'm not sure if you are mentioning Linux style /proc because you think it's bad or because you think it's good?
/proc. And you can do things like /proc/pid/fd. Most modern Unix-like operating systems have /proc for viewing processes. Solaris and QNX do, I know that for certain. proc stands for PROCess
/proc by making it some kind of kernel configuration interface like Linux does. BSD uses sysctl interface to control kernel options (like the number of file descriptors for example).
/proc/ is a real shame, also if you've ever written a kernel module in linux that provided /proc you'd notice that there is some very peculiar behavior. For example you can't just dynamically allocated each line, you have to just allocate a buffer of data ahead of time, fill it in and ship it off to /proc. Otherwise you'll end up with some really terrible race conditions where data might change in mid-read. Also Linux /proc system information files are not seekable, with is another inconvience.
Anyways. First part, is BSD does have
BSD doesn't overload
The way Linux has overloaded
The proper way to do a lot of these things would to use an ioctl on the device that the information would be associated with. And that's generally how most operating systems deal with it.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I ran it for a while...switched to it when a Slackware install ate itself. YaST is fairly decent at configuring stuff it knows about, but building/adding "outside" apps gets to be a little tricky. After a couple of years or so, I built an LFS box...once I was somewhat familiar with that, I started building systems around LFS instead, as it delivered a lightweight system with just the stuff you want, and it was usually a bit faster.
Nowadays, I use Gentoo...it offers most of LFS's performance advantages in an easier-to-use form. I have Slackware on an old 486 for which building LFS or Gentoo would be impractical. I suspect I'd be lost if I tried picking up SuSE again...I'd have to figure out its quirks. Ditto for Redh*t, which I've never used, aside from some poorly-configured boxes set up by a clueless "admin" who didn't know WTF he was doing. (Tried Mandrake once...pitched it after a day or two. I think the pattern that's emerging here is that the more shiny the Linux distro, the less likely I'll be able to get it to do what I want.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
I'm not so sure about that. I think it was taken out of (or beyond its) context, although I do find the sentiment somewhat brusque. The companies that *are* starting to distribute linux on servers and now desktops are working mainly with Red Hat and Suse, who make most of their money from support services the corporations rely upon. That's just a fact right now - corps want another corp they can bitch at. If they were smart, they'd bring in a few savvy admins, use a free distro and pay *them* for support. But there's that whole "If they were smart" condition, applied to corporate IT no less...
The heat from below can burn your eyes out
Good Day
XML causes global warming.
Mandrake is a product of MandrakeSoft.
UnitedLinux is the parent company of SUSE, the European arm which produces SUSE Linux. There is also the Asian arm, TurboLinux, and the South American/Latin arm, Conectiva. Yep, all these major distributions fall under the same parent company. So you're pretty accurate in asserting that there's only a few big players as far as corporations go.
---
WARNING:Slashdot karma not redeemable in the afterlife.
Okay someone help me compare distros to music:
RedHat: Mainstream
SuSE: Classical
Debian: Folk
Slackware: Rock
Mandrake: Country
Gentoo: Techno/Pop
FreeBSD: Heavy Metal
NetBSD: generic drum rythms
OpenBSD: tranquil, stress-relief
SCO: Satanic
The unofficial
After seeing all the outraged comments on here ("Waddyamean he thinks my copy of Gentoo isn't a distro?!"), I'm surprised, because I think he's right (at least, in terms of corporate distros). Before any holy warriors mod me down for saying this, I should provide a disclaimer...OK...here goes...I am a distro bigot, and I would never use anything but Slackware (if it's my decision to make), because all the major distros are disgustingly bloated. Slackware -- it rocks. RH/SuSE/etc -- they suck. Just the facts, ma'am. *ducks*
Now that we've got that important fact out of the way, let's look at Oracle. Last I checked, Slackware, Gentoo, and other distros that lean further toward the hobbyist/programmer/hacker end of things were not supported by Oracle -- it was only SuSE and RedHat. It's not just Oracle -- as a general rule, if you find some proprietary software that they're trying to make a Linux port of, and they name a distro, it's about 90% likely to "support" RedHat and maybe 40% likely to "support" SuSE.
Reason for the quotes around "support" would be that most of the time, a specific distro is not needed. It's the same kernel and most of the same FS setup (well, Slackware's init scripts are a little bit bett^H^H^H^Hdifferent, since they follow BSD instead of SysV). However, naming the distro supplies a corporation with the perfect ass-covering if it's something their tech-support hasn't been trained on. "What, you don't use RedHat? Well, I'm sorry, but we can't support your software. Even though you paid us $5,000 this quarter for gold-level support. It's broken -- you fix it."
It comes of picking something very specific to train $6.50/hr helpdesk personnel who aren't likely to investigate and learn a new distro. Plus a reason I can sympathize a bit more with: If the customer is breathing down the company's neck to fix this problem that they had with a homebrew distro some BOFH in the customer's IT dept. crafted, it will cost a lot of time, money, and perhaps contracts (as the customer gets more impatient) to get it fixed. Better to go with an extremely common standard, even though they are the lowest common denominator in terms of distros.
So I agree -- to the corporate world, there are only SuSE and RedHat distros. The rest just aren't supported.
There's no sig like this sig anywhere near this sig, so this must be the sig.
You mean "alternative" as in "same old shit with a different name"? Was that horribly poor comparison on purpose?
XML causes global warming.
You also realize that IBM is a partner with UnitedLinux?
Labeling SuSE as evil because of it's association with UnitedLinux is as wrong as labeling TrollTech as evil because it's association with Canopy Group.
Basically, this is another non-story.
What?!? There's only two - SCO and SCO, nobody else!!
Expect to be sued.
Yours, Darl McBride
:)
When the new genereation of UDMA 66 drives came out (iirc), appearently lilo wasn't ready, if I had a 33, it would have been happy. It was one of those things after the fact, so, I go with lilo, it all looks ok, then the next step of the install mysteriously craps out, so I go to boot into windows to do some email, check out some documentation etc. And that crapped out too. Fortunately, the disk utilites that came with the harddrive did a nice job of planning for just such an emergency. But it was annoying. Turns out that this was a known problem with lilo at the time, but mandrake thought it'd be best to try to bury it, as opposed to prominently mention it.
Tools are far from perfect. And they occasionally fail, even when used as intented.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
given the recent SCO events, UnitedLinux is dead.
But Suse's future depended entirely on a success of UnitedLinux. Suse is in many respects like SCO: they don't really believe in open source, but only in closed source pay-ware. Thus, the suse administration program YaST is closed source. In the end, they will sink with their partner SCO.
Eventually, the distro world is gonna be:
- RedHat (corporate users who think they need phone support)
- Mandrake All people who want to use linux but don't want to edit config files by hand
- Gentoo All those who love editing config files in emacs and vi, and to spend their time compiling kernels and wanking on how fast their PC compiles it
- Debianfor all those who think it should be named gnu instead of linux and that Stallman is good and Linus is bad, and who choose their distro on ideology rather than on rational aspects
Suse is a corporate enitity, which makes other corps that much more likely to deal with them. The 2-distro comment is bunk in the common market, but in the corporate market it's spot-on.
Sounds like a jerk to me too, but like the man sez, it's corporatespeak. No matter what happens in the corporate world, we'll always have Slackware and Gentoo and which is fine by me, although if Red Hat and/or Suse can keep working well with the corps, then that's a good thing too. When was the last time you had a beer and listened to heavy metal with a corp exec? Hmm??
The heat from below can burn your eyes out
Your quote is also out of relevant context since you fail to continue with the rest. Here is the relevant snippet:
/. story submission which quotes Seibt as: "Linux means two companies: RedHat and SuSE, and nobody else." Obviously, Linux does not mean two companies, it doesn't mean any company, Linux is just a kernel.
It's my view that the industry has decided there is one main operating system competitor to Microsoft, and that is Linux. Linux means two companies: Red Hat and SuSE, and nobody else. There will be no third distribution that will be supported by the large IT vendors. And from that perspective, even Novell decided not to compete anymore on operating systems. They now migrate all of their applications to Linux. This is a two-horse race between Linux and Windows. [emphasis mine]
So, there! He's giving his opinion about distributions that will be supported by "large IT vendors". He is also talking about Novell bailing out of OS competition. This is a corporate environment.
What is even more out of context is
If you want more, read the question thas was asked as well, and read it carefully, not just copy and paste. The question was:
But is it Unix or Windows that's being used less because of Linux? And will there be a shift in the future toward Linux replacing one or the other? For instance, as Linux on the desktop becomes more prevalent, will it be Windows that's more at risk?
The first question is: What OS is Linux displacing more right now: Unix or Windows? The second question is: As Linux gets more popular on the desktop, what OS will it displace more in the future?
In response to these questions he mentions HP, IBM AIX, Sun Solaris, and SCO, out of which his vendor analysis comes out. It is obvious he is talking about corporate server environments supported by "larte IT vendors"!
I'm in UK.
I run SuSE 8.2 because it's the only distro I've found that will actually work on my PC - others (Mandrake, RedHat) fail to work with my RAID controller (KR7A-RAID).
SuSE's install and config tools (YAST1/2) are great for newbies like me.
"Linux means two companies: Red Hat and SuSE, and nobody else. There will be no third distribution that will be supported by the large IT vendors."
Tough to argue with that.
"Anyone that has ever gotten an idea based on any of my work and done something better with it-good for you."--J.Carmack
Slackware is nice for embedded systems, but let us not forget Lineo/embeddix.
Mandrake is alive, more or less, but its still in bankrupcy for the time being. Debian isn't a company as such, but it definately warrants mentioning.
...All press about the management of Lindows, points towards them being interested in bettering linux. Mandrake caters to it's consumers and redhat is a company that gives back to it's community. Suse seems to be out only for their benefit and while they might make a good product, I don't want to support their business style....
Sorry to rain on your parade, but you're into serious bullshitting territory here.
SuSE (~300 employees) has a subtancial amount of fulltime developers programming OSS day-in and day-out. They pretty much did Alsa by themselves, they did something like 90% of United Linux and they are the ones in the market offering the biggest value for the least money. They've translated big parts of the linux documentation into german and offer a solid service that goes beyond just having a cardboard box. A box with the largest paperdocumentation on a linux distro, I might add. Shure SuSE wants to make a buck, but stating that they're only focusing on their benefit and not giving back anything of substance is just plain silly.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Whoever summarized the article really took offense to the "two distros" comment. That's a pity: SuSE is a good community citizen, and has gone a long way toward making Linux acceptable to the corporate and government crowd. They're also convinced Linux belongs on the desktop--as opposed to (for instance) Red Hat, which seems to have decided Linux desktops are for hobbyists.
He's right, by the way: the IT world is concentrating on SuSE and RH right now. That doesn't mean Gentoo/Debian/Mandrake/Slackware and the rest don't have a place, but none of these distros have done much to get themselves certified for government adoption. SuSE has. Power to 'em.
I like SuSE, and have put 8.2 Professional on five machines in the past few months. My friends love it. It's an easy install, and yast is a convenient manager. SuSE goes naturally with KDE.
The only computer in my life that isn't running SuSE is my iBook, which uses Yellow Dog 3.0. It's tough to beat Terrasoft's Mac hardware support.
I'm happy to buy from a company that's passionate about the platform and knows how to play hardball with Microsoft.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
I definitely agree with you that the optimizations aren't the real reason to use Gentoo. Right now, the learning process is key to me, later on, the package management is what's going to keep me hooked. Remember, I'm coming from the Redhat-based world of RPM hell, so Portage is a huge step forward for me. It may not be the absolute best, but I like it. :)
:) Either way, right now, Gentoo is turning out to be the perfect distro for my current needs, and that's what matters. It may not be perfect for others, but hey, that's why we have so many different distributions. It's all about choice.
Really, what I'm enjoying right now is the fact that I know exactly what's on the machine, and that I can add or remove packages at will with a single, simple command line call. Or that I can check for updates and patch them just as easily.
Most people do focus on the "from source" nature of Gentoo, but that's really only a small part of it. Gentoo's still a relatively young distribution, and I think that it's yet to fully define itself. I think that as it matures, there will still be a bleeding edge aspect to it, but that it may very well more drift towards an Unstable/Testing/Stable type system much like Debian. Really, it's already starting to happen - the ~x86 keyword for example, and the "heresy" of distributing binaries.
Here are the distros currently supported by Oracle.
;-)
Yes, it's mostly just RedHat and SuSE that are supported by Oracle. Actually, SuSE just falls under UnitedLinux alongside SCO and some others. Not just any SuSE, either. The personal edition of SuSE you can download for free is not supported. You need Advanced or Enterprise Server versions of RedHat, SuSE, and other distros in order to be actually "supported" by Oracle.
That said, I'm sucessfully running Oracle 8i on Slackware and Oracle 9i on free SuSE, but those are non-production servers for evaluation.
The production servers run PostgreSQL on Slackware, naturally!
I'm writing this on my Slackware box. I also have a Redhat server, and my daughter's workstation is a Redhat machine. I use Red Hat for two reasons: 1. A project I am on at work uses Red Hat, and 2. I didn't have time to fiddle around with the things in Slackware, that work out of the box in the Red Hat distro (particularly when you are doing desktop services for your family).
I did find Red Hat limiting for my own applications - and I prefered the way Slackware handles configurations, more 'unix - like'. Since 1994 I have used many different distros, including Turbo Linux, Gentoo, Mandrake, Linux Pro, Suse, Debian, and Knoppix. Over the years I always keep coming back to Slackware (although I use Knoppix as a recovery/utility disk at times - due to its ease of use).
If I had unlimited money and time, I would run Slackware on a standard fast motherboard/peripheral setup, that I would tune and lock down configs on, and all of the 'chrome' stuff my daughter likes (what's a "shell" Dad!?) would be tweaked out for her and my wife.
Unfortunately, I work on computers all day (configs, programming, troubleshooting, consulting on system admin issues - you name it), and have neither the time nor the energy to do it 'right' at home. So my menagerie of computers of various makes, models, ages and operating systems will have to suffice until that day I win the lottery, find out I have a rich uncle who left me his estate, or sell the great American novel...
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
I have used Linux since slackware 3.6a. I have tried slackware upto 7.0 then to redhat 5.2 at some point, then suse 7.0 and 8.1 and one of the more recent debian builds in between the suse versions.
...everything is right there for you. .rpm's with more ese then my redhat 5.2 could
Why SuSE? A few reasons:
1. it works out of the box on every box from my an old p75 to my newest 2.4GHz with and without scsi, and raid.
2. it has the shortest install time, esp. since everything is now on one DVD or 7 CD's
3. yast2. the way suse can handle both tarballs and
4 it has a killer firewall script that is just extremely fast to edit, so i don't ahve to waste hours rewritng my firewall whenever i move a box from its role to a new one, or 10-15 minutes just to play a new online game or something.
Slackware is and was great, but i got tired of wasting all the time building from tarballs.
Redhat was just riddled with bugs and problems, even installing its own rpm's
However, I think SuSE has seen its day, too. They have gone too proprietary, and non-standard compliant, making it a pain in the rear to update these days. Needless to say 3 years of SuSE is now soon to be over on my boxes...back to slackware or maybe something new, for I shall not use RedHat due to past experience, and I will not use it simply because "its what everyone else uses"...which is why most people in the US use it, I think. Because I never found it that impressive compared to other distros.
oh, and i live in the US, also.
Despite the abscence of funding, Debian is the second most popular Linux distribution we find on internet web sites, surpassed only by Red Hat, and leaving the likes of SuSE and Mandrake in its wake.
So if Netcraft are to be believed, Richard Seibt seems to be right in that it is a two distro world; its just that SuSE isn't one of them.
Installed the Bubblemon yet?
[..]Debian was developed specifically to counter "Linux Companies"[..] That, my dear Twitter, is complete nonsence. Please read the retrospective by the founder of Debian himself. When the Debian project was started, there were no other distro types!