------------------------------------------- Dear Messrs Hartje and Dick, I am writing to you as a thoroughly satisfied workstation user of SuSE Linux. I read with puzzlement your recently posted reviews of SuSE Linux 7.1. It is hard to see how one could arrive at the conclusions you present on the basis of the evidence. First things first. You harp on the fact that this is "geared towards" the desktop user, not the server administrator. This is much the most obtuse way of missing the obvious point that the average desktop user is going to need more help than the average systems administrator in setting up a new system. Naturally, therefore, the documentation is heavily weighted towards the needs of this user. And the documentation, when compared to documentation that is bundled with any other OS in a similar price range, is simply and incontestably unparallelled -- it's one of the reasons many people choose SuSE in the first place. To say otherwise suggests one has an axe to grind. However, let me not rest there. There is, in fact, a wealth of documentation addressing basic server setup; and the paperless docs that come with the SuSE CDs are as much as anyone needs. Have you looked through any of this superb work, the online support database, the man pages, the info pages, the pdf user guides? What is more fantastic than the suggestion that SuSE lacks in documentation for server software is the claim that there are "no server utilities". Is this some kind of joke? Please browse through the CDs again. You will find that SuSE comes distributed with more server packages and utilities, all specially packaged for use with SuSE, than any other major OS or distribution (FreeBSD is close, but most of the packages don't come with the distribution; they have to be downloaded from a server). All at no extra charge, and most of this software is very highy quality. For those who want to pay a little more for convenience, SuSE also offers specialized groupware servers, an email server, and a DB server, information on which is available at their website. Did you look there? Surely this is basic research, a minimum standard of journalistic integrity that you should uphold? You say that the (KDE) desktop is very different from Windows, and that this is a demerit; sure, if being very different from a donut is a demerit of being a flan. Your logic, in other words, escapes me. Yes, there are some differences, but there are enough similarities that the user of average intelligence will feel comfortable in no time. OS-X is roughly as different from Mac OS-9; Windows XP, at first glance, seems about as different from 9x as KDE is from Windows. Is this also a "demerit" of these OS's? Will you recommend against upgrading to them as a result? The most stunningly perverse paragraphs of the review are these: At $69.95, SuSE 7.1 professional is much less expensive than Windows desktop competitors. Nevertheless, the costs of retraining and lost productivity associated with migrating from a Windows desktop environment to Linux would be prohibitive. As a desktop operating system, SuSE 7.1 Professional would be a good fit only for Microsoft haters and cash-strapped companies installing systems for the first time. Even with Windows 2000 Professional selling at close to $300 per user and Microsoft Office 2000 Standard at close to $500, we see no compelling reason for companies to shift from Windows on the desktop. Prohibitive? If someone is truly just doing word processing and email, most skills involved in these tasks are easily migrated. More complex tasks like desktop publication, graphics, etc. would in many cases require retraining or would not yet be possible. However, that is an argument for people who have specialized tasks to keep their current OS, or be retrained, not an argument against migrating a whole body of average users. Let us say a company has 100 workstations. You are saying that at $800 a pop, for a total of $80,000, that the price difference between MS and SuSE ($79,930), not including future savings on upgrades, is "not a compelling reason"? I wonder what would count as a "compelling reason" for you, then? Your piece better reflects your biases than your rational abilities. I hope you will reconsider it. -- Corvin Russell <corvinr@sympatico.ca>