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Novell Returns to the SUSE Name
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."
NIS+ > Novell, hell I'd rather use rc.d and copy accounts to /etc/passwd from a LDAP/MySQL DB on boot and mount a users ~ to a NFS drive than screw with something that has been around since DOS, and never left that ERA!
NO~, I read Slashdot because I think it's stupid.....
From their pointless support of dead projects like Mono to stuff like this re-branding, Novell continues to be a boring mystery of a company similar to Borland.
Go ahead Novell, kill it. You know that's what you are really good at. It is inevitable. RIP SUSE.
Meh.
1. Code quality -- the quality of KDE code is shocking. Most KDE apps, and indeed the libaries, are just thrown together. There's no attempt at real dependency or modularisation.
2. C++ -- like it or not, zealots, C++ is a liability if your underlying system relies on it. It's great for apps... but shit for libraries. KDE breaks every five minutes due to ABI changes.
3. Licensing -- Qt's licensing is a millstone around the neck of KDE. As a consequence, KDE is a walking dead project. Even TrollTech realise this, and are already making preparations to make Qt's event loop work via GTK's. An admission that GTK is now the foundation of the Linux desktop -- as if it wasn't obvious from the level of commercial use and support GTK/GNOME has.
4. GNOME has all the best apps, by a wide margin -- with one exception: CD burning. K3B is ace and all CD burning apps for GNOME are crappy. Apart from that one anomaly, it's no contest.
So there you go... not really a difficult decision for Novell. They had to choose GNOME.
Why is Novell investing so much in Mono? I know Miguel De Icaza is one of the main guys behind it, and he works at Novell now, but it still seems pointless. No one else wants to touch Mono because they're worried about Microsoft killing it if it starts to take off. The only apps being developed with mono are Novell stuff like Banshee, F-Spot, Beagle etc. Maybe some Windows people who don't want to pay are also developing with Mono.
It's fairly obvious at this point that Mono has completely failed as a development platform. Hopefully they won't do any long term damage to Gnome by embedding all sorts of Mono software (Beagle especially) in it.