On Thursday 07 April 2005 19:18, Ken Schneider wrote:
On Wednesday 06 April 2005 20:46, John Andersen wrote:
Its SO cheap compared to windows (any flavor).
I'm going to be controversial here and disagree with you. Time between Windows XP and Longhorn is going to be roughly 5 years at least. Price of an upgrade will be somewhere in the range of $125 dollars. In that time SuSE will have released ten releases (6 month release cycle). At a cost of $60 for each upgrade you're looking at $600. [snip] The main difference is that of you have 10 PC's to update it blows that
On Fri, 2005-04-08 at 00:09 +0100, Stephen Boddy wrote: theory out of the water. 10 X $125 = $1250 Vs $600. Keep in mind you only have to buy one copy of SuSE Vs 10 of windows and you don't get all of the other software updates as well. Last I knew the windows update didn't include the office updates.
Even for one PC maintaining Windows adds up. There's the yearly subscription to pay for necessities like Norton AntiVirus and SystemWorks just to keep the Windows functioning. (Also remember to throw in the dollar value for your valuable time to run all the tools and perform routine scans for exploits and hacks that just seem to magically appear on Windows.) Also, SuSE 9.x upgrades don't supply just a replacement OS as the Longhorn upgrade will. It includes gigabytes of productivity software, office suites, tools, utilties, games, etc. To draw a fair comparison remember to include paying for subscriptions and upgrades for all the Windows closed and proprietary applications during this time up through the release of Longhorn. In the end the boxed Linux distro looks like a bargain to me on just a single computer. Multiply that bargain times multiple computers if you have them as Ken S., says. Plus SuSE includes some of the nicest user manuals and system admin docs printed on actual paper. My wife's computer came with XP which included a fold-out poster as documentation. Money well spent (not).