Dear colleagues, I have certain marketing suggestions and feedback for SuSE Linux 7. Although in general SuSE Linux may be qualified as "very good", there are some weak points. ----------- MARKETING --------------- There are MANY popular news and tech sites (with total number of visitors counted by tens of thousands/day), which do not charge anything for short announcements. Also, professional mailing lists should not be forgotten. SuSE just is not there. It will take probably one part time man to do it all. There are around 250,000 - 500,000 Linux users on the Mac only, how much of them bought SuSE? If SuSE could get just 5% it would translate to 12,500 copies sold, in the worst case ! ----------- UPDATE/UPGRADE --------------- 1) FTP update procedure with YaST 2. Look at Debian and Mandrake (and MacOS), how it should be done. Remember, many people, especially with Mac origin, demand for simple (!) and fast update procedure. 2) WEBMIN is a MUST in SuSE distribution. Although it could be downloaded and installed separately, it is not clear how it will work in conjunction with YaST, which WEBMIN modules may conflict with YaST. You cannot rely just on one administration tool! 3) Installation with YaST must be simpler, YaST should keep catalog of available software packages from distribution CDs and FTP directories (like Debian). 4) Too many internals of YaST are not well documented. ----------- SUPPORT --------------- I found volunteer support on the Debian mailing list to be clearly superior to the one I had with SuSE. Most questions answered the same day (often even hour !), and I did not got replies like "KDE2 problems are not covered by installation support". The best solution I believe is to create a forum and mail list dedicated solely to support and configuration issues. Let's be honest, for $50 it is just NOT possible to afford 60 days tech support. With best regards Andrei Verovski andrei.verovski@bigfoot.com