Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (2634 mails)

[Robert Smits <bob@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday 28 February 2007 01:24, John Andersen wrote:

>
> The down side of that is SLED with a $50/year price tag will quickly
> outpace the cost of XP.

Nonsense, John. Windows Vista costs far more to buy and to use than SuSE SLED.

First, SLED will run on most anything that's reasonably current. For Vista, 
you're going to need a new DirectX 9-compliant 3D 128-MB video card that 
supports Pixel Shader 2.0 in hardware and WDDM (Windows Device Driver Model) 
driver. You'll do a lot better, though, with 256MB of RAM.

And Vista is turning into a real memory hog, with many reports suggesting you 
need up to 2GB of ram just to get it to run decently. Any box with 512 MB of 
ram is going to run SLED just fine. 

Microsoft does supply its own antivirus and anti-spam software, Windows Live 
OneCare. But, it will cost your company $50 a desktop per year. SuSE SLED, on 
the other hand, comes with Clam AV for free. 

If you want to buy Microsoft Vista, you're going to fork out $299 for the 
suggested retail price for Windows Vista Business. Even if you get the 
upgrade version it'll cost you $199. 

And don't forget you can get a three year subscription to SLED for $125.

Cost for Vista over three years?

Extra Ram and Upgraded video card       $300
AntiVirus and Antispam subscription     $150
Microsoft Vista Business Edition                $299
Total                                                   $749

Cost for SuSE SLED for three years      $125

And we haven't even started to compare the costs of the other proprietary 
software Microsoft wants to sell you, like Microsoft Office.

Even if your existing computer has the horsepower to run Vista, which will be 
doubtful, and you ignore everything except the cost of the operating system, 
Vista is still twice as expensive as SLED.  

Bob Smits bob@xxxxxxxxx
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