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Novell Returns to the SUSE Name

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the penguin-by-any-other-name dept.

soren42 writes "It appears that Novell has decided to rename their enterprise desktop line SUSE, once again. According to an announcement at CeBIT, Novell will be releasing the next version of their desktop product under the name SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop - ditching the moniker Novell Linux Desktop. Naming aside, it looks like the features will be there to make it a strong desktop competitor."

2 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. Re:turn off the lights by wclacy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Most Government agencies have not switched from Novell products because Novell products Work better and cost less.

    What do most Government agencies use Novell products for? Most use mainly File and Print Servers as well as Novells Directory.
    Novell has the Best File Server, The best Print Server, and the Best Directory of any Company and any product!
     Many of their other Products could also be considered better than the rest.
    ZenWorks is much better than Microsofts SMS! What do you want people to switch to? Microsoft?

    The company I work for is in the process of switching over to Microsoft for File and print.
    We are switching from Netware 5/6 servers to a Windows 2003 Cluster.

    For this switch my company has paid millions to Microsoft and in the end we are going to have less functionality and it will take more time to manage than what we could do with Novell 10 years ago!!!

     The reason that Microsoft can sell it's product is because they make their pitch to the CIO of a company, and tell the non technical CIO how much money he will save. (They don't tell him about the increased down time and increased time to manage and patch. Or the hundreds of thousand of dollars he will have to pay to 3rd party software venders just to make the crap work.)

    I have talked to some IS staff at various places and have heard the same story from all of them:
    Microsoft came and talked to the CIO and gave him a deal on Microsoft products, But Only if they agreed not to renew thier contract with Novell.
    In most cases they were willing to give them Microsoft software to replace their Novell software for pennies on the dollar. Microsoft looses nothing since they were already getting the same amount of money for Windows and office. But now they are able to use their Monopoly on the desktop to try and push Novell out of business.

    I have been supporting Netware, windows, Linux, and Unix since the early 1990s and I have not found anything that works as good as Novell's products.

  2. Support Confusion by Skewray · · Score: 4, Interesting
    When I used to use SuSE, I went to the SuSE website for support, such as using bugzilla. With the switch to Novell, I had to wander around for hours in Novell's mazelike web pages to find, register, and use the same set of support utilities. Will I have migrate back to SuSE for the next distribution? Maybe half here and half there? What a mess they are making of this. Reminds me of Red Hat's mess when they stopped supporting the desktop, and then created Fedora some months later. A lot of users, myself included, switched to SuSE then.

    On the other hand, I have found SuSE/Novell/whatever much more pleasant to use than Red Hat. The Novell bugzilla response has been particularly good.