Folks,
I hope no one takes my comments as blaming SuSE for not doing a good enough job. If I could do the job they do, I'd be selling distributions, not buying them. To address the OP's question about running in a production environment, SuSE Linux 9.0 Pro is at least as stable and reliable in a production environment as any OS you can buy from that company in Redmond WA.
Just to finish it up, I concur completely, couldn't have said it better :-)
Well, I disagree -- about SuSE's PR and support for the English-language market. I've a little history here; I was a SuSE reseller and a SuSE Consulting Services client while such a division existed. SuSE's presense in the American, English, Australian etc. market has always been haphazard, poorly planned, and poorly supported. Mind you, that is par for the course; Red Hat has abandoned its desktop users, and Debian is frequently more concerned about license and procedural correctness than getting software out. So I'm not switching away from SuSE (yet) but I will certainly continue to complain. But, even when I was a licensed SuSE reseller, I could only access the list of known issues in German. Makes me realize how the rest of the world feels about English! But it made it impossible for me to commercially support clients running SuSE, since when they encountered a distribution issue I knew no more about it than they did. I quit and started suggesting that my clients buy RHES on supported hardware. Hopefully Novell will cure this. Novell has a history of reseller support that I hope they bring to SuSE. In the meantime, there are some easy, cheap things that SuSE could do to improve their online support for English-speaking users (and other languages as well!): 1) add a search engine for the mailing list archives 2) open up the SDB so that volunteers can translate issues from German (and provide some infrastructure to support this) 3) support bug reporting (ala bugzilla, though hopefully using something else, like RT, Jira or Roundup) by the community. 4) put a paid employee on this list to respond to questions and comments that don't get fielded peer-to-peer. If a tiny company like Win4Lin can do it, so can SuSE. None of the above would cost very much and would make a world of difference to SuSE users in the US. If all-volunteer OSS projects can do it (and they do!) then certainly a capitalized company like SuSE can do it. -- Josh Berkus Aglio Database Solutions San Francisco