suse

One of the things I enjoy reading the most is an honest review.  Too frequently reviewers try to be too nice and just make everyone happy.  Jason Perlow from ZDNet decided to do one of these honest reviews on SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11.1 (SLED) from Novell and it was less than flattering.

Over the last two weeks I’ve had the uh, <cough> pleasure of evaluating a very recent release candidate for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11. To bring some perspective into this review I’d like to revive an analogy I’ve made in the past with affection about SUSE being like a German-engineered high-performance luxury touring sedan. However in the case of SLED 11, I’d say Novell has released the Linux distribution equivalent of the 2002 BMW 7-Series. Deluxe and feature-packed, but so frustratingly flawed, unrefined and overly complicated it makes it excruciatingly difficult to love.

He did get some things wrong in the article such as complaining about there not being developer packages installed or available on the disk, Samba services off by default and other little issues.  Many of his complaints are not valid as SUSE 11.1 is a Linux Enterprise Desktop and as such is designed to be used in a corporate environment.  Samba for file sharing would never be turned on in a corporate environment and developers would typically not use this version of SUSE.

Even with the things he gets wrong in the article it is a good read and worth it if you have the time.

Check It Out> ZDNet