Jay Smith wrote:
The real major difference is support.
OpenSUSE is free and meant to be used as a desktop Linux.It's not suited for enterprise usage because it's unstable, always changing, there's a lot to keep up with. SLED on the other hand is pretty much standard. You get a few Service Packs every so often, but for the most part, what you see is what you get.
Actually, the difference between SLED 10 and opensuse 10.1 is that SLED 10 is desktop client only, while opensuse 10.1 is much broader in scope - not only client, but server, development system, and everything else. For the most part it's the same code base, but there are a few extra tweaks on SLED. We had sled on some dev machines here, but the techs didn't like it "where's my apache web server, where's my j2ee, where's my mysql?" and they had me nuke SLED and install suse 10.1, which made them happy. SLES on the other hand is much broader than SLED, and better tested than opensuse, and it's more expensive. IIRC the kernel has some extra performance patches, and of course it's officially supported by 3rd party vendors. As for opensuse being unstable, I've found it to be pretty solid. As far as "always changing", that is under the control of the administrator, but last I checked, my suse 10.1 servers were still suse 10.1 - they had not changed into anything else, and they won't unless the administrator decides to change them.
On the otherside, The only support you get on OpenSUSE is community support and maybe any literature you can find off of Amazon or Ebay. SLED, you get support from Novell when you need them.
The support from Novell is basically there to make managers feel good. We've had 24/7 support from Novell for our SLES servers, but we really don't ever need to talk to those folks. If you've got local linux talent on hand, it's a tossup, but if you've got the budget, it's worthwhile to go for the enterprise version. Joe -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org