I was looking at SuSE Linux Pro 9.2 a while ago, just for fun. Now I am looking to buy a Linux distribution, and when I went back to the SuSE site, it had been completely integrated with Novell. SuSE 9.2 had been pushed out of the spotlight and in its place are SuSE Linux Enterprise and Novell Linux Desktop. I would like some of your opinions in which to choose for my OS. Apparently Novell Linux Desktop has its own desktop environment and does not include any kind of development tools, while SuSE Linux does. I am worried that Novell will cut support for SuSE products (especially YaST). Please give me your opinions and suggestions. Thanks in advance!

Well, all good questions. I think though that the "clean" Suse distribution is safe for now. So I'd recommend Suse Pro 9.2.

(Personally I prefer Mandrake 10.1 or Fedora Core 2, but Suse Pro 9.2 is also very nice and a top distro).

Okay then. Thanks for your insight!

Yeah, I was in a similar situation. I got the free Linux resource kit from Novell, with SLES 9 and SuSE Linux pro 9.1. I installed the latter, and liked it very much. I thought about buying 9.2, but then discovered what you did.

I don't know how to feel about this SuSE/Novell merger. My first reaction was "crap, again a nice open source company being bought out by a corporate monster". This might be so, and it might have negative effects on Suse's desktop products, they will definitely be catering to the industrial market instead. But let's not forget one thing: the corporate market is were Linux is getting strong. Really strong, and with a company such as Novell behind the scene (didn't they just win a $500 mio lawsuit against MS ?), there will be a massive pressure on hardware and software manufacturers to support Linux. Heck, ATI just released a note that they would redesign their Linux 3D drivers, but only because of Suse/Novell's corporate campaign. That's were the money is folks, not on the Linux desktop market.

So all in all, I'm happy with the merger after all. We won't lose Suse's free desktop products, that would be against the Linux license. But they will in fact focus on the corporate market. On the other hand, this will guarantee good support of hardware vendors, and maybe a new flood of professional software products for Linux. Let's not forget, that all this will also benefit us desktop users: optimized for Suse or not, drivers will also run on other Linux distros. Perhaps not so nicely integrated as with Suse, but with a little manual tinkering, they will work.

BTW, I don't think they will drop Yast. Yast being one of the best packet and configuration manager to date, Novell would be stupid to drop it. They will most likely include it even further into their environments, perhaps rename it, but they won't kill it off.

SuSE really hasn't changed with Novell. But they do have quite significant amounts of money now, and they're doing tons of R&D. A couple things are changing (like official Gnome support on SuSE is going away). But it's really the best distro out there.

A few comments:

Suse personal edition doesn't come with any development tools, only the professional edition (iirc the personal edition doesn't even come with a dhcp client, which forces a lot of people into getting the professional edition) (<-unless any of this has changed since 9.0)

Consider that YaST wasn't open source, and didn't become open source until after Novell bought Suse, so I don't think there's too much to worry about there

When I used suse I felt that they really really didn't want me to use gnome anyway, and it never quite worked right (though the ximian (also owned by novell) was quite nice), so if gnome support gets dropped from suse that's no big deal, especially when novell linux uses it

Quote: Original post by Promit
(like official Gnome support on SuSE is going away)

Eh?

They're doing a dual-DE distribution right now, and if either DE were going away (and there's no indication that one will anytime soon), it'd be KDE.

The guys that started the gnome project work at novell. Novell bought Ximian (a gnome company) and SUSE (a linux distribution that happened to favor kde). Gnome is cheaper to develop commercial applications for. Do the math. :)