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SuSE Sales up Significantly

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the hey-look-at-us dept.

Lost in the Corporate Maze writes "SUSE rides the Linux Cash Cow!. I guess someone asked SUSE to "Show me the money!". What's the breakdown between US and World sales? Where is this revenue coming from? Enquring minds want to know. " We mentioned this before, but its interesting seeing to appear in a major pub. Amusing step in the rivalry between the major distributions. This is getting fun, but its also further proof that Linux is getting bigger.

2 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. Why SuSe's Linux version... by yabHuj · · Score: 3

    SuSe's Linux always came with smooth, simple yet powerful installation routines - and good documentation (even back in 199(4?)).

    The distributions I tried (well, some years ago) were well suited for beginners, but not for the more advanced user, with "hacker" documentation and optional modules missing there and where (or in ... unusuable places) - ever configured sendmail.cf (nearly) from scratch (NO example file available)?

    SuSe was the first distribution easily available on CD in Germany - and the first company offering professional support since Linux 0.99.x. See, my first linux CD was a SuSe with kernel 1.0.9

    In case someone asks: now I use (and prefer) Debian, but I intend to try OpenBSD soon.

    1. Re:Why SuSe's Linux version... by Eric+Green · · Score: 3

      SuSE is now quite a bit better than back then. sendmail.cf in SuSE, for example, is now well documented and easier to hack than Red Hat's configuration (it was VERY easy to add an alias to myself so that everything coming out of my home machine had a return address of "e_l_green@hotmail.com", for example, even though I was logged in as "eric@england.local.net"). I still don't run SuSE on a regular basis, but that's because of their, err, "unique" take on the FSSTD (putting configuration files some place other than under /etc) and because of YaST being non-free software (under the Open Source Definition).
      Regarding OpenBSD -- very nice. Very clean. Very "transparent", meaning that even the install is just a shell script that can be interrupted and examined if you want to see what's going on or do things by hand. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of software for it pre-packaged or in 'ports', and driver support is not great. After fiddling around trying to get apsfilter to run so that I could get decent printouts, I caved and installed FreeBSD.
      FreeBSD looks good so far, but it appears they have "Linux Symdrome" -- i.e., putting "user-friendly" front-ends on the install and config tool that are not "transparent" in nature (everything is acting on a text file, but you have to do some digging around to figure out WHICH text file -- shades of Red Hat's 'printtool'!). Still, it has a ton of 'ports', lots of 'packages', and drivers for all of my hardware (though I had to swap out the ES1371-based sound card I had in my machine for an old AWE-64 Value that was in my Windows box). My only real problem is getting a real office suite working on it. So far I've had no luck getting Applix to work (even though I used 'brandelf' to brand all its binaries as Linux). Next I'll try WordPerfect, which will at least import all of my old Applix documents, but I use Applix Graphics to develop the headers on my web pages and stuff (very easy, lots of clip-art, point'n'click), and that'd be hard to replace.

      -E

      --
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