On Mon, 2007-10-29 at 10:36 +0100, Wolfgang Rosenauer wrote:
So I wouldn't expect any lower downtimes or costs when you'd use Gentoo. Sorry but I don't believe that Gentoo is doing a great job in keeping compatibility and stability (over for example 7 years) so that you would have to invest a lot of time to fix systems after "broken" updates.
My experience has been otherwise, everywhere I have deployed Gentoo it required almost zero maintenance. However I must admit these were home users only. However looking at the cases in which Gentoo is deployed on a large scale (Medium to large clusters using Gentoo) I suspect it would be also suitable for a corporate environment.
BTW your numbers seem to be wrong. I get 279 EUR für 7 years of SLED.
My mistake, where did you get that figure?
OK, in my opinion SLED is pretty interesting for companies because they don't have to care too much about the workstations themselves. Updates are available a long time and do work in most cases so it's not much maintenance needed (what would cause quite some costs for companies). For installations with Gentoo you'd need more manpower to maintain the systems I'd bet so it comes with a cost.
I think you are right about SLED being interesting for companies. maybe Novell should make a interesting offering for home users looking for something very stable? Another problem is that SLED has security support for far fewer packages. SLED only provides support for suse-oss and suse-no-oss which isn't a whole lot (I guess around 3000 packages) in comparison to Gentoo/Debian/FreeBSD which have security support for respectively: 12.000/22.000/16.000 packages.
Compared with Windows I think it's in most cases no simple price comparison. We are talking about two completely different systems with advantages and disadvantages. In a corporate environment you also mustn't compare with XP Home. So the price difference is not high and it makes IMHO no sense to compare these prices. Compare everything else but not the license/maintenance costs here.
There you have a point, however it would be good for Novell to offer something for the home user besides openSUSE.
I don't have too many arguments in the home user space though. If people want a Linux system which is supported for a long time they have to invest money in some form. Gentoo is also no option here IMHO because those people don't want to "play" with the Linux system but work with it.
Wolfgang
I have deployed Gentoo many times to absolute Linux beginners without problems. As long as you know how to click an icon on the desktop you're fine. Any problems I encountered could be easily (within 10 minutes) be solved through SSH. -- Regards, Aniruddha Please adhere to the OpenSUSE_mailing_list_netiquette http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_mailing_list_netiquette -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org