On Sunday 20 August 2006 07:44, suse@rio.vg wrote:
Look at Fedora. For a while, people kept using it because they'd used RedHat previously. Now it's being dropped left and right for Ubuntu. Every Ubuntu user is going to now recommend Ubuntu or its parent Debian at their workplace. Whereas RedHat used to be virtually synonymous with Linux here in the states, many of us are increasingly regarding it as irrelevant, left behind, and riding out on name recognition.
Your point is key. SuSE's 8 month release schedule has always been something of a mixed blessing. It kept your machines current when kernel development was fast and furious, but it is the bane of the corporate world, the very market that Marcus indicates is Novell's big concern. Ubuntu is shouting about their Long Term Support, Quoting: "Ubuntu is freely available, including security updates for five years on servers, with no restrictions on usage and no requirement to purchase support contracts or subscriptions per deployment.". In my market, (mostly small businesses) deploying SLES, which will be obsolete in two or three years VS Ubuntu with 5 years guaranteed support becomes harder to justify. Many of my smaller customers just buy the boxed set of SuSE instead of SLES. I am facing such an install now, where I have to decide if I want to put SuSE 9.3 on the server, or Ubuntu. SuSE 10.1 is just broken, and totally out of the question. 9.3 is old, but rock solid. Ubuntu is a bit of a learning curve for me, but offers a promise of stability for my customers. _____________________________________ John Andersen