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Review Of The New Novell Linux Desktop
dave writes "Tom Adelstein has published a thorough review of the new Novell Linux Desktop, complete with plenty of notes and screenshots. An excellent review to read for those following the newest desktop Linux offering."
Hey,
Visit the Novell home page to get to the download area. You clearly didn't look.
It looks pretty similar to SUSE Pro 9, minus some of the packages. I have installed the demo and it looks pretty good. True, I'm a big Novell'er from way back, but it looks like a solid corporate distro. It has everything your daily worker would need right out of the box. GNOME is just fine for that type of worker, they aren't getting paid for 'pretty', just to work.
Sure there's some room for improvement, more specialized installations, package selection on installation.
But overall it's light and fully functional for your corporate desktop. That is the environment it is meant for, not for the hobbiest or server areas. If you want to tweak or customize with different packages to get 'out of the box' then this distro isn't for you and wasn't meant for you. I hope people get that concept about any of the corporate desktop distros.
And for $50/year for updates, that seems pretty decent to me!
-m
http://www.invisik.com
Hmm, not true. NDL is based on SLES packages (the rpm versions should be the same with an SLES CD set) but selected in a different way. It should not have more functionality built-in. Similarly, it will have the same cycle-of-life, will be supported for something like 5 years, any version of Pro will never last that long, 9.1 didn't last long before 9.2 came out and we all installed it like lemmings on the run.
OOo 1.9 (alpha not recommended... yet) has huge load time improvements.
The Ximian updates did not play well with other platforms. This is now addressed and the changes are in the 1.9 release.
I find it incredible the speed that the OpenSource movement updates this and makes things work better faster.