Hi,

I have a question:

What is all this fuss about SUSE? I mean I've been using Debian/Slackware for a year. last week I installed SUSE just to see how it looks. As the name SUSE has been appearing recently
in various Linux magazines, I thought I'd give it a try.
I liked the installation of SUSE, but then, I don't know...
it's just resembling windows a bit. I mean, I didn't like the GUI. I am not saying that SUSE is not worth installing, firstly because i still consider myself a newbie so I do not have enough knowledge to pass such judgments, and secondly, I used SUSE only for a few hours, but I just don't understand what is so special about it?
Does it have an excellent packeging system?
Is it more reliable than other distros? etc
Or is it just because Novell is supporting it financially.

Can anyone explain the situation to me?

Thanks guys

I believe there are more factors that someone can prefer SuSE.
Personally I use them for a reason many others hate them... YaST2 and top neat software.

Now that you mention that Novell support SuSE I gotta say that, why you thought of only SuSE? While Fedora Core - Red Hat and Ubuntu - Canonical are out there on the top?

Maybe people feel safer in a way, if a company is behind a distro rather than a community.

thanks, for your reply.
Yes, obviously I know about Red Hat (I didn't know about Ubuntu -Canonical) But here we may have the answer:

The three distros most commonly mentioned in magazines are the ones financially supported by companies.
And the reason for the financial support is probably that they are in some way worth it.

So what's wrong with Debian?
Isn't it good enough to be commercially supported or the Debian community want it to stay within the community?

FC is a derivate of RH9. FC is RedHat's play garden and the normal user is the tester. They have a big influence on its development so stuff that needs to be tested will first go into FC before it goes into 'commercial RH.

Ubuntu is a rebranded Debian. Mark Shuttleworth decided to promote/support open software, took Debian and a couple of its developers and produced Ubuntu.

Don't know the story behind Novell/Suse.

I don't want to start a flame war here but I believe Novell is a Microsoft wannabe, always lived by the MS shadow after NT appeared and NetWare domination stopped at the 90's. That's when they wanted to find another road to reach the top again. It's not hidden from someone, companies run for money not for charity.

It's a company that I could call a veteran at the market. Server market actually, I believe the upward of Novell started at 2003 with the acquisition of Ximian and later with SUSE at 2004.

SuSE was well know at Europe for the stability and easy of use. So Novell just acquired an almost ready distro, polished it, put some of their hackers into work and now we have some incredible distros around(commercial ones).

SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (commercial)
SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (commercial)
OpenSuSE (community driven --free)

As so many times as they claim again that OpenSuSE is not a test platform for the enterprise I won't believe them, it is one and that's how things are.

About Debian now, nothing wrong with Debian, actually is an awesome distro (with sloooow realease cycles,though) and that can be verified if you see how many other distros are based on them. But it's a distro for idealists, they only have open source packages so that takes away many users who wan't mp3 and some device drivers out of the box or with an easy installation.

And magazines at their front covers will show xgl and compiz not the 74638th processor architecture debian supports. New and shiny things I mean not how small and well bundled is DSL.

I'm really anticipating other people to respond to this thread.

You obviously don't remember the days when Novell ruled the networking market. For a long, long time Microsoft was a Novell want-to-be. Every few years Microsoft would come out with some unworkable network, people would try it and say "Microsoft will never be able to replace Netware".

There's still a lot of companies running Novell servers, and Novell also sells a lot of their directory services into the Fortune 500. The hope is that us linux people will now be able to go into a major corp and say "Novell, the server software company you guys have used for decades, have this new server software that you ought to try. It's not as expensive and difficult to run as all your Microsoft stuff. "

I stopped using Redhat the day they decided FC to be test bed. That simply indicated Redhat was more interested in revenue generation - That too leaving majority of users of red hat users in dismay - treating their usage as mere g pig testing.

I now use ANY distribution but Red hat. Switching to Suse was - Thank god - easy.
Suse was and is far stable then Red hat.

I'm currently using Suse and used redhat years ago. Suse is a very
complete distro...not that you couldnt duplicate that yourself..
it just saves you alot of trouble. I does appear to be a little
slower than I remember Redhat being...but that might not be currently
true, as it is booting alot more overhead..than the redhat 5 I used
to use. The yast installer works great for me, It helped using it
to install my ATI card versus a manual install. Got accellerated
3d running without a hitch. If you are refering to KDE(winblows
look alike)...I don't use it...you can do a gnome install or use
any window manager you want. Gnome and KDE are the smoothest I
have seen yet though. Could be others out there though. I also
believe that having a commercial entity behind a product has value
and will increase its longevity....will help keep it current.
They have done a good job with it.

OMG, thanks for your reply mpc,

I started this thread almost 2 years ago and still got a reply - fantastic - Well, I don't have any dilemmas about Suse any more I don't use it. Just a matter of personal preferences

I love SuSE and KDE. It honestly seems easier to use than Windows.

I'm posting this from my SuSE linux notebook!