Slashdot Mirror
SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 Released
MrHoolio writes "SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 has been officially released. This long-awaited/anticipated release is a make-or-break release for Novell. It promises not only a new sleek improved interface but also increased productivity with stability and less worry about viruses and the like. The pricing for the Desktop is $50 a year if you want product updates and support. Otherwise ... like other linux distros you can download it for free, but with no support."
This is a common and regrettably still widespread misunderstanding. The term 'support' when applied to an enterprise product does not mean simply 'availability of assistance with and information regarding the product.' It means, specifically, the availability of a legal entity with whom a manager can sign a legal contract which specifically assigns certain responsibilities. In other words, companies use Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell/Suse Linux Enterprise Server/Desktop because they can sign a contract with those organizations which makes those organizations (or their designated proxies) legally (ina contractual sense) responsible for providing security updates, technical assistance, and the like to their users.
"Better support from the community" may be true in that there is 'cheaper' support available; it may be true in that there are more knowledgeable people available (if you can find them, and they're willing to talk to you, and...etc.). However, that's not what 'better' means in the enterprise world. 'Better', to an IT manager, means that their department has done everything possible to mitigate risk and can show that in quantifiable terms, with legally guaranteed response times and effort levels, along with predictable costs.
That's what 'Enterprise support' means. For the home user? Nope, not necessary. For someone who has to budget the cost of running a thousand user desktops on linux six to eight months before the year of run begins? Critical.
A hero is someone who knows when to run away. I am a hero. -Trent the Uncatchable
Mainly it's support (managers like having official channels better than posting on Ask Slashdot), but there's also issues of product lifecycle and (for those who want them) the inclusion of non-FOSS apps and drivers.
The lifecycle generally goes like this:
1. Test releases of the free version
2. Full release of the free version
3. Repeat 1-2 a couple of times.
4. Release of an enterprise version
Stability improves at each stage, so by the time you get to SUSE Enterprise, or RHEL, etc., you've got something much more stable than openSUSE or Fedora Core.
Then you get 5-7 years (depending on the company) of guaranteed updates without having to worry about upgrading your system. Sure, you can usually perform an online upgrade to a new release using apt-get or yum, but upgrading from Release N to Release N+1 is always more risky than updating components within a release.
I had the privilege of using this through the beta versions and have to say that the desktop provides a great interface that even rivals OS X. It has elements that are similar to both XP (access to programs through a Start button-type feature) and OS X (a portion of the function of Expose is recreated). IMHO, this desktop fits in well with what corporate users are used to. Also, the Novell distribution of OpenOffice is very stable and handled every doc created with MS office apps that I threw at it. Installation and configuration were a little more complex than Mac OS X but aproximately on par with a clean Windows install. I strongly recommend taking the time to check it out.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
The difference lies in what businesses want vs. what enthusiests want. Businesses want a stable platform that will undergo minimal change - generally, security and driver updates only in the Kernel and major packages. The reason is that they sometimes run closed-source (gasp) packages on top on Linux (such as Oracle, Domino, etc.) that can't be recompiled if something significant changes. The vendor (Red Hat or Novell) will take care of back-porting appropriate patches to the previous kernel versions, etc., and continue to provide a "stable platform" for at least two years. This way, your IT staff and third-party suppliers (IBM, Oracle, etc) can have a slowly-moving target for their applications and not waste a lot of time figuring out which kernel structure changed to break such and such application. Enterprise hardware vendors (HP, IBM, Sun, etc) can develop, test, and certify their device drivers (let's face it, not many enthusisasts own $10,000 - $500,000 servers) against a stable platform as well.
:-) ) systems. When we do have problems (which is reasonably rare), we don't have to go into endless discussions over the astronomically huge possible combinations of patches and updates and which combinations are functional. 99.99% of the time everything Just Works (and the other .01% is usually because you did something out-of-spec).
Most of use that support these servers are happy to trade being a year or so behind the latest and greatest features for the joy of not worrying over whether some update or other is going to break our critically important (at least to our companies and our carreers
This isn't to knock community-developed distributions - all of my personal systems run them, and I've used them on occasion in enterprise environments where we were just running stuff included in the distro. But like most things, you need to choose the write tool for the job...
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana