A CIO's View of SUSE's Enterprise Viability

onehitwonder writes "As part of an ongoing quest to find a viable alternative to the Microsoft desktop in the enterprise, well-known healthcare CIO John Halamka spent a month using Novell SUSE 10 as his sole operating system. His conclusion? It's good enough for the enterprise. In Windows vs. Linux vs. OS X: CIO John Halamka Tests SUSE, he explains how SUSE stacks up against RHEL, Fedora, XP and OS X (in a life-critical business environment), and which issues should influence an enterprise-class organization to adopt it."

Comments

Now That's a Good Viewpoint

[nz17]

We've had everyone from HardOCP to grandmas post their opinion on the "best desktop system" issue, but I think someone with not only workers and an enterprise on the line, but the life-and-death of people on his hands, is really going to give an honest opinion. He doesn't want deaths on his hands either directly or from his recommendations. I think everyone reading this post should give the article at least a cursory glance before jumping to their own opinions.

Re:Now That's a Good Viewpoint

[Ant P.]

One of the things that might've put him off Windows is the EULA clause near the bottom stating "NOT SUITABLE FOR CRITICAL SYSTEMS INCLUDING NUCLEAR REACTORS, LIFE SUPPORT" etc.

Re:Now That's a Good Viewpoint

[ColdWetDog]

He's not running a nuclear reactor -- or a hospital. He's just doing email and typical business person stuff. Nobody lets a CIO do potentially dangerous or important things.

Re:Now That's a Good Viewpoint

[gweihir]

It's time to thin the herd.

I don't agree. The differences are of an other type than the ones between, e.g., versions of Windows. First thing is that the "look and feel" is really not tied to the distribution. Whether I run fvwm2 on top of Suse, RedHat, Debian, etc. does not matter much for its look and feel. That is almost completey determined by my .fvwm2rc file. Second thing is that hardware support (i.e. kernel) is again not tied to the distribution. I am running Debain with a stock kernel.org kernel with my own config. I did the same before with Suse. Not a problem. Third thing is that the rest of the OS is again not tied to the distro. Practically everything can be changed or customized. Same is true for the applications. Which distro I run an application on makes very little difference. The most difference makes the window-manager, but that is an application in itself and not distribution specific.

The thing that does matter is support and updates. These can be very different from distro to distro. This is also the point that becomes very important in professional adoption. Of course Linux has all the advantages here, since MS support is really very, very bad. For Linux you not only can get better support. You can have your own people do it on every level. Or buy the support from a lot of different poeple, with just the quality level you need. And if one support offer cannot cut it, moving to another one is a very real option.

And if you do not use the vendor-support, the distribution becomes even less important. Of course a large organization will need to hier a few Linux gurus in a move to Linux. But the potential gains are staggering.

Re:Now That's a Good Viewpoint

[ozmanjusri]

It's time to thin the herd.

So don't use the bad distros, and do support the good ones.

It's called "competition" and while it's been absent from the OS space for a long time, it's what drives innovation in capitalist economies.

Look, this dumb meme gets trotted out at just about every discussion of Linux. It's dumb because:

• Linux is free. That means anyone can make their own distro. Even if you were right (which you're not), there's bugger-all you can do about it.
• Having plenty of competing distros encourages distributors to keep improving their versions.
• Because of the copyleft provisions of the GPL, improvements in one distro can be adopted by all other distros. That means if one distributor fails (like Corel did), their efforts are not lost to the community
• Having specialised versions of Linux filling dozens of different niches means it's that much harder for an aggressive and predatory competitor to "fucking kill" all of them.

It's great that SuSe is able to fill the corporate desktop niche, but I'd still prefer to use Sabayon for gaming, Puppy on my pen drive, SME on a small server, Debian on a big one, Ophcrack for rescuing Windows users who've forgotten passwords, etc, etc, etc.

There's plenty more reasons this meme is dumb and dangerous. Try thinking of a few yourself, preferably before posting next time.

Re:Now That's a Good Viewpoint

[shlashdot]

"It's time to thin the heard"

no, it's time to develop a decent groupware solution.

Re:Now That's a Good Viewpoint

[Maxwell]

If you build your own PC's and put up screenshots on your desktop on your website, then it's 'fun' to have dozens of versions of everything. If you are a CIO, it's a pain in the ass and a huge, huge, problem with Linux adoption.

You gave no reason for you assertion that multiple versions is not a problem, but allow me give you some for reasons for why it is:
# You can't even use "linux" because there really is no such thing.
# And you can't hire Linux people because there is no Linux people, there are Fedora, RHEL, Suse, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, BSD, FreeBSd,Openbsd people, etc, etc. And the "linux" crowd tends to rush off on whatever the latest trend is, remember when Caldera Open Linux was trendy? Now it's Ubuntu, whoops, Kubuntu, whoops, linspire, whoops now back to Fedora. Like little kids running after the shiniest candy.
# And no they are not all 'the same'. They have wildly different directory structures, gui, lib version, kernel version support options, kernel versions, etc.
# Oh but any *good* linux admin can use any system, right? How many is that? If a CIO hires 100 Windows admins, thee will be 10 good ones, ten useless ones and 80 somewhere in between. If he hires 100 linux
there will be 2 good RHEL, 2 good SUSE, 2 good Ubuntu, 2 good Fedora and 2 good 'weird brand', 10 useless and 80 somewhere in between. That is spreading the talent pool pretty thin... It's no wonder Oracle on Windows is so popular, at least you can hire someone to install the thing!

Sorry, but multiple versions is holding Linux back at the enterprise level and will keep doing so until there is a clear winner aka 'standard' that can be relied on for stability, industry support, and support personnel. RH and Suse as a 1 - 2 combo were looking very good, but now ubuntu has wandered in and taken most of the community's time...until the next shiny candy shows up...

JON

Re:Now That's a Good Viewpoint

[NeverVotedBush]

I won't name where I work, but it is pretty big - over 12,000 employees - and they are seriously considering dropping Windows to switch to Linux. Vista is not considered suitable, the cost is huge per seat, and they figure that as long as they are retraining the workforce to use something, it might as well be something that is cheaper, more secure, and more reliable.

I know people will say that the TCO might be higher but in the long run, is it really? Once you get people moved over and used to it, and after a few new versions of OS where MS keeps gouging but Linux stays free, there is a point where the cost drops drastically comparitively. We don't have so many trained to support Linux yet, but that's coming.

Bye MS.

Re:Now That's a Good Viewpoint

[Jane_Dozey]

In a corporate environment one enterprise distro will be used and the same software loaded onto each desktop. That means no problems with directory structures, libs, DE's or really much else. Everyone in the company will be using the same thing, much like they are with windows (can you really see the IT dept letting users choose between windows versions?).

The company doesn't care about whether there's a "linux" or not. They're using RHEL/SuSE/whatever not this mysterious "Linux". I think you'll find a whole lot of "Linux people" disagreeing with you there. Every single Linux admin I've ever met has used lots of different distros and knows the quirks of each one. The company will hire people who can do the job on the system used, not those who don't.

A *good* Linux admin will know whether they can use the system or not and apply for jobs accordingly. A bad admin might try and wing it but hey, they're a bad admin and should never had been hired in the first place.

At the enterprise level there are very few options. I can currently think of 2 off the top of my head: RHEL and SuSE. These are what companies will be using and these are what they will be advertising jobs for, so no, at the enterprise level multiple versions really aren't such a problem.
But what if more enterprise distros appear? I still don't see a problem. The IT market has a habit of having it's top 2 or 3 choices and a multitude of alternatives. IT managers will be using the top 2 or 3 and pretty much ignoring everything else unless they get good enough to topple one of the current leaders, in which case there's still only 2 or 3.

It's only really when you get down to individuals and their home desktops that it becomes more difficult...

Re:Now That's a Good Viewpoint

[BiggerIsBetter]

The thing that does matter is support and updates. These can be very different from distro to distro. This is also the point that becomes very important in professional adoption. Of course Linux has all the advantages here, since MS support is really very, very bad. For Linux you not only can get better support. You can have your own people do it on every level. Or buy the support from a lot of different poeple, with just the quality level you need. And if one support offer cannot cut it, moving to another one is a very real option.

Indeed, I've done just that this week.

I've been running Novell SLED10 on two machines, and have been very happy with it. It's the most professional desktop distro I've seen (good enough to pay for - twice). That is, until the politics started and the SP1 update was released. One machine updated nicely... until the next reboot when a broken initrd didn't let it come back up. The other machine wouldn't update at all, probably due to not having bought the optional "upgrade protection" (SP1 is an upgrade, not an update?!), or possibly the updater, or maybe even something that I've done.

Anyway, rather than fight with a broken operating system or a company moving in directions I don't agree with, I downloaded Ubuntu 7.04. I'm back up and running in 2 hours, with no data loss/copying thanks to keeping /home on it's own partition. Even better, the same would apply if I'd gone with most any other distro such as RH or Mandriva.

We've done the same thing with the server too, moving across 3 vendors over a period of several years due to changing policies and distro hardware support. I just can't imagine being at the mercy of one vendor, especially in a small market like New Zealand.

As long as Linux is free, so are my systems, and so are the companies they work for.

Re:Now That's a Good Viewpoint

[mrsteveman1]

RHEL and Suse are the exception, everything else is forked to infinity.

Heres an example, I have a production server I need to run VMware server on, if my running kernel doesn't exactly match one of the 50+ modules VMware was nice enough to compile and include (wasting their time), I have to keep a build toolchain on a production server just to install the kernel module. That is not acceptable.

We don't need forks of everything just to change one small part of the system, we don't need 2 package formats, we don't even need 2 desktops (gnome is at best a thin client right now).

It has already hurt the Linux environment and anyone using Linux.

Re:Now That's a Good Viewpoint

[Ajehals]

So are companies currently running a single windows flavour on everything? No they may run XP on their desktops (Probably a few 2K, NT or 98 boxes left for some application that doesn't like XP), Vista on some of the laptops (Sales need the latest gizmo's). Windows 2k or 2k3 server (Or more likely a mixture) on their internal servers (if they are a windows shop). A *nix on their web servers, whatever OS is in their managed routers (with its own management applications), PalmOS on their PDA's, Symbian on their Phones, Mac OS on their Graphic designers Powebooks.. Its hardly a monoculture.

With Linux you could get closer though, you could be running Dabian on all your desktops, Laptops and servers, And then Debian derivatives on your routers (well maybe...), PDA's and Phones... I haven't seen Linux specifically for switches but it may get there... - you could really get to the point where our entire IT infrastructure is based on the same code base, but still role specific (i.e. you are not going tobe running KDE on your servers or your PDA's - the kernel or each type of device is going to be different).

So as an enterprise you could have a license free (and therefore license cost free - no extra software costs associated with growth...) environment, total compatibility between everything (Your PDA works seamlessly with your desktop scheduling and mail software and happily mounts NFS shares to sync documents.. (I do that at home - never done it in a corporate environment))
All updates and patches come from a single source, or can be aggregated into a single source using the same methods (you can run your own internal repositories and manage all your application maintenance - not just the OS and some applications (ala Windows) No more having a SUS server, a Anti-Virus Update Server and a million small updating systems and scripts..)

I guess what I mean is that Linux is as diverse as you need it to be, but that diversity can be harnesed and standardised standardised... Its easy to create policies and procedures to manage and maintain Linux environments, (and to automate that management) in a way that isn't possible with windows.

The obvious caveat with all this is that you obviously (as a large company) cannot just install the latest release of Ubuntu on your desktops, the latest version of PCLinuxOS on your laptops, Red Hat on your servers, some OE Linux flavour on your PDA's, Phones, switches, and Routers and just expect stuff to work. You need to think about it first, design a good system and then implement it well.

So does that sound like the ramblings of a gear head? I would assume I would use about 4 different distributions (All derived from Debian), plus probably different versions of those distributions (stable / unstable) across the enterprise. Every Specific role would have a base image (including as much software as possible that as common to sub roles (i,e, Common Drivers, X, a DM, NFS Client, Office and productivity software on the Desktops, Common Divers, Tripwire, SSH maybe NFS on the servers ). Fro these you derive your environment... All very neat, simple and safe.

Oh and you have all the code so the vendor cannot harm you by going bust.
Oh and you have your own update servers so they cannot be denied to you.
Oh and you can change where you get your updates from, as other distributions will use the same code.
Oh and you can make your own changes to your applications if you need to and have the resources.

I cannot think of anything that offers these kind of possibilities except Linux/BSD. but correct me if I am wrong.

Re:Now That's a Good Viewpoint

[WindBourne]

Of course Linux has all the advantages here, since MS support is really very, very bad.

If is funny, but I got modded down for that a couple of days ago. But you are 100% correct. MS has more an 100 billion dollars in the bank, and are still whining for customers. Yet, if they had spent even a fraction of that on boosting support (and had spent a couple of more billions on development), then this blog would NOT have happened. The CIO would be judging Linux against a superior OS, rather than a peer with many issues.

As it is, I think that Linux is already superior. What is needed is more ease of use and better compatability. In particular, Sun (perhaps combined with IBM and HP) would do well to continue extending the OO to support project and the other parts that are missing. In fact, IBM and HP could create a group of coders to take that on and create a pure GPL (or even a different OSS license) app.

As to thinning the herd, that would be the biggest mistake. MS has been focused on Redhat and cut a deal with Novell. In the meantime, Ubuntu popped up. And it is winning accolades. Great support as well as a VERY easy to use app. It shows that real competition changes things. Worse, if this herd was too thin, then MS can successfully target the small # of companies and Win. Even suggesting that would be akin to suggesting that the best way to help Grizzly bears would be to thin their herd and then offer unlimited hunting against them.

Re:Now That's a Good Viewpoint

[Nutria]

And some desktop tools use Gnome, which means they work best on Redhat.

Well that's just a load of crap.

Re:Now That's a Good Viewpoint

[init100]

As to thinning the herd, that would be the biggest mistake.

Fortunately, that is simply not possible. Nobody has a mandate to declare that only a few distros can exist, and distro maintainers have to answer to no one guy. They can happily continue to maintain their distro forever, giving the "we must thin the herd" crowd the raised middle finger.

These are NOT life critical...

[Creepy Crawler]

If anybody knows about medical tech, they do NOT run "laptops" or desktops on critical equipment.

The life-maintaining equipment runs only secure hardware, with mathematically proven code, and fiber-optic links for isolation (to prevent electrocution hazards). There was even a heart monitor someone made and posted to /. , and it would have likely killed someone as it had them hooked up to a computer serial port.

SuSE will NOT run on the dangerous equipment. It will run on the network as a "online chart". Many people should be against that as well, for altogether different reasons. This is somewhat critical, as most med groups run paper charts just in case..

In Other News...

[Anonymous Coward]

When it comes to sex, nerds everywhere claim that an inflatable doll is "good enough".

Why listen to this guy?

[Anonymous Coward]

well-known healthcare CIO John Halamka Most well known for being the responsible guy for one of the biggest hospital IT failures on the books. All hospital systems out for 4 days? What kind of good CIO has that kind of failure on his watch?

See http://www.medical-journals.com/r0313.htm

Re:Why listen to this guy?

[good soldier svejk]

Most well known for being the responsible guy for one of the biggest hospital IT failures on the books. All hospital systems out for 4 days? What kind of good CIO has that kind of failure on his watch?

In this case, one who inherited a broken network architecture from a previous CIO and was denied funding to fix it until it was too late. I know; I was there.

Re:Why listen to this guy?

[cyphercell]

funny, for me when I clean up a Windows PC it's all about re-imaging the thing. Why? because once you run the AV, the Registry Cleaner, the ad-ware remover, blah blah blah, it's a ton quicker, cleaner, and safer just to re-image the damn thing. You can spend days on a Windows machine cleaning things up that are archaically crufty after just a year of use. Of course I may be dealing with a different class of user than you, but I feel that on a system that is as heavily targeted for attack as windows is, it almost requires a new image every year or so, I mean who knows what's on there that you can't find.

His conclusion? Its NOT ready...

[NoGenius]

The author of the summary is flat wrong when he says the conclusion was "ready for the enterprise". If you actually RTFA the exact words were: "Though he personally is pleased with the OS, Halamka is not so sure he'd deploy it widely in his organization." Incredible that the poster of this article actually gets the conclusion 100% wrong. Biases like this is why nobody trusts technology people for an opinion of the readiness of new technology.

I second SUSE laptop experience

[itsjpr]

I've used SUSE 9.3-10.2 on a lightweight Dell laptop for the last 3.5 years. My experience was nearly identical, down the wifi connection issue after suspend and the work around. :)

I've used SUSE for a while. They pulled me away from RedHat with SUSE 9.0. It was the first linux I used that just worked after being installed. I didn't have to jigger with crap. RedHat lost me when they decided to put the desktop user in second place. I've used Linux exclusively for home and office for the past 5 years and it's been SUSE that made it enjoyable.

Too bad Novell felt the need to lick Balmer's d*** last fall. The best thing that could happen to the computing world is *not* greater compatibility between Linux and Windows. Windows is on its way disappearing into the ether. At the moment it fast becoming just a crappy API that can run (safely) in a VM to support the odd application that's not got a functional duplicate on Linux (eg. IE for testing web pages and some of the corporate crapware clients (oracle)). Too bad Hovispan forgot to read the judgment from the MS monopoly trial and pay attention to ever other poor bastard that thought they could dance with the devil.

I don't know about that.

[twitter]

uname -a on one of GE's latest generation of CT scanners reports a version of Red Hat. Diagnosing cancer may not be as life critical as an EKG, but it's not something you want to have crash or degrade over time or have some kind of file quirk that screws up images.

Do as I say, not as I do? Bogus worry.

[twitter]

His real opinion is this:

The X60 running Novell SUSE is the first Linux laptop I have used that is good enough to be my only computing device,

That is astounding after only one month of use. Most users take years to shake bad old M$ habits and almost as long to learn which of the dozens of free packages is their favorite for any given task. Most people want their Windoze safety blanket for a year or so. This kind of endorsement is ringing - he's saying that he could do without Windoze tomorrow, forever. He's right but has not had time to develop real confidence in his opinion, which is reasonable given the billion dollars a month M$ spends on marketing and lock on major vendors.

To be fair, you should have quoted his worry. What's keeping him from recommending widespread deployment? Well, this:

"I dont know enough about the remote management tools and capabilities for it"

OMFG! and,

"For your average administrator or manager who is very comfortable with Windows 95, 98 and XP, it might be a little bit of a leap"

Free software absolutely kills Windoze for remote control and management. The fact that thousands of computers have been corralled into clusters for decades should tell anyone that remote configuration has been mastered long ago in the free software world. It's amazing how much easier things are when you don't have integrated licensing and copy protection built into the product itself. On top of that, Novel offers it's own set of tools to manage mixed environments which are widely admired. This is a slam dunk for free software and Suse.

The other concern is a bit condescending. Even fanboys, given proper support and encouragement, soon learn how much better free software is. It's true that the deeper you are into M$, the harder it is for you to see anything else, but those who escape become the biggest M$ haters. They, more than anyone else, bear the brunt of M$'s intentional waste. It makes them angry but they accept it without knowing any better. Eventually, the lies melt away and all the talk about software freedom sinks in. Liberate them for just a while and it's all over.

Easy there!

[twitter]

Do you think this will help the image of Novell after drinking Microsoft's Kool Aid? No, only when pigs fly.

If your boss offered you the chance to migrate from the Beast to Novel, you would be crazy to say no. The more free software people use, the better. I'd rather everyone used nothing but free software and I don't like that Novel endorsed M$, but let's not get carried away. When the alternatives are to stick with seven year old software and slowly migrate to Vista or migrate to Suse, Suse is the clear winner.

Re:Authenticate into AD?

[DragonTHC]

you can add a suse computer into a windows AD very easily from within yast.

and samba does integrate tightly into AD. It can server as a PDC, BDC or standalone Fileserver.

"Typical User" - no such thing

[Venik]

Here are some of the recent impressions from someone who just had to deploy a 120-node SLES 9 cluster, shortly followed by an 80-node RHEL 4 cluster. This is not scientific research, so here is my unscientific professional opinion: both RHEL and Suse are a royal pain the ass to install, configure and maintain.

I have over a decade of Unix sysadmin experience (Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, IRIX) and about five years Linux experience (Red Hat and SuSE primarily). To give you an idea of my personal preferences and my unbiased nature: my personal laptop runs Solaris 10; my work laptop runs Suse 10; my home PC is a Windows XP Pro; my work desktop #1 is RHEL 4 WS; desktop #2 is Suse 9.1; and desktop #3 is a Sun Blade running Solaris 10.

So what is my problem with Linux? I like Suse as a desktop system. It's easier to configure and re-configure then Red Hat, mostly thanks to Yast and some logical organization of things. I am not a GUI sysadmin: I live inside Korn shell. Still, having a well-organized GUI is useful because you just can't remember everything.

All the little annoying things, which I can deal with on my laptop or desktop, are multiplied to obscene proportions in a large cluster. Scali and Yast apparently don't like each other; there are strange transient NFS problems having something to do with large file support; patching is more complicated then it has to be with RHEL and absolutely infuriating with SLES.

I don't want to go into all the bugs and idiosyncrasies of the two leading enterprise linuxes, the bottom line is: you want reliability and performance - stick with the big 'nixes and leave Linux to ripen a bit more. You want a desktop, then go with Linux, if Windows is not your cup of tea. But be prepared to catch heavy flak from your former Windows users.

There is no such thing as a "typical user". Rather there are typical tasks. Web browsing, emailing, text messaging are all trivial things you can do with most modern operating systems. Or can you? How many of your users ran into problems with video and sound using a Linux desktop? Why don't Java applets in Web pages never seem to work right under Solaris? Why does a thousand other things go wrong?

Is Linux more buggy than Windows? I don't think so, but many of my users do. They are switching from Windows to Linux - not their choice to begin with - and, being already used to all the Windows problems, they find Linux bugs to be new and worth complaining about. A lot. I have Suse 10 running on my laptop PERFECTLY. Everything works right: video, sound, wireless, card reader, volume buttons and all the other little things that usually annoy Linux users. But it wasn't easy getting there and it has to be if Linux is ever going to squeeze Windows market share. Not every PC user is a Unix sysadmin and they don't have to be.

Re:and it was not suitable for that either!

[Daychilde]

"It's kind of like ... unsafe at any speed."

And if you go read up on the history (as opposed to the 'popular knowledge') of the item you reference, you might be surprised at how much that really applies.

Tip: The car in question wasn't nearly as unsafe as it was made out to be - there was a lot of hype involved. That's true here. Not only of Windows, but also Linux and Mac. Some overhyping of the good points, and some overhyping of the bad points...

Well Twitter,

[ColdWetDog]

I'm glad you read the article. Now go back and work on reading comprehension. He's looking for a desktop OS replacement. I've worked in health care for over 20 years and desktop computers don't run health critical systems.

Desktop computers ("PCs" in the vernacular) run things like, please excuse me if this raises your blood pressure, Microsoft Office, Windows Explorer, Outlook and Bugs Bunny wallpapers. The critical systems typically use an embedded OS (ventilators and other machines that go "ping") or they run some UNIX variant (CTs, MRIs).

I'm trying desperately to get our small hospital off of XP. All we run are the above "productivity" apps and a bizarre VT100 terminal program that talks to the billing / order entry / lab system. Any reasonable Linux system would be fine except that company that runs the back end system won't allow anything but this oddball emulator to talk to their system. (Don't even think of VMware or similar - that's much too complex for them).

But anyway, don't have a heart attack if you see the green and blue wavy fields on the screen at your local ER. It won't shock you.

Actually ...

[Kristoph]

The conclusion of the article is that:

Though he personally is pleased with the OS, Halamka is not so sure he'd deploy it widely in his organization.

Although he apparently thought much more of SuSE then he did of RedHat, which is covered in this article:

http://www.cio.com/article/41140

Incidentally, in that article (which is the actual comparison) he says the best OS is Mac OS X, although his favorite piece of hardware is a Dell?!?

]{

Now That's a Good Point

[HangingChad]

since MS support is really very, very bad

I have a live version of Kubuntu running on a machine downstairs. I could install the live version to test that hardware, network compatibility and that it could find the shared network printer and backup drives. It didn't cost anything and the few minor problems resolved online. Actually, there weren't any problems, all I had to look up were some installation instructions. Didn't need to buy anything, call anyone, wait for anything. Tomorrow I can install it if everything else checks out. What risk am I taking adding that OS to my network?

Microsoft support, like Dell's support, used to be THE reason to stay with Windows on Dell hardware. But lately they've both let their support slide. There's no reason to stay with them. There's no risk trying Linux. You can test everything before committing. And it doesn't cost...how much are MSFT service calls going for these days?

This Article Is Heavily Flawed

[Heembo]

Here we have a study buy a highly technical CIO that claims that SUSE Linux is an acceptable enterprise OS. This is bunk. Any solid technical person can use any OS and make it work.

Show me a study where a non-technical standard business user is successfully using SUSE for 30 days as their only OS, and suddenly you got my interest.