Comments on: Change in Maintenance for openSUSE 11.2 and Future Versions

By: Luis Freitas

Luis Freitas — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 16:20:19 +0000

Unfortunately David W, you are wrong. I paid.

By: pvdm

pvdm — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 20:00:01 +0000

Simple: if you NEED >18 months (1,5 years) of support, then you likely run a mission critical system and stability, security and performance is obviously crucial to you.
In that case you would go for a supported version, and that is the SuSE Linux Enterprise Server/Desktop SLED/SLES solution. They *have* that support. And that costs some money. But hey, you wanted proven stability: they provide it. They test stuff etc.

If you don’t want to pay, you have to ‘accept’ what the community delivers, for free.

Don’t wine about going to Ubuntu: their engineers are also paid for, this time not by you but by a millionaire. So that is a sort of endless pool of resources. But for instance remember who releases the most kernel fixes: novell or canonical: its novell, by far. Think about these kind of things before you make a decision.
Bottom line: you NEED stability: there is a price to pay

By: Dario

Dario — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 05:15:36 +0000

You can get Win 2008 for free for 8 months (same as opensuse policy), You can get Seven RC for free, final version will have 3 rearms (4 months) and that is what typical Smith choose. People are still working on XP – 8 years old system. Don’t get me wrong – I’m using opensuse for over 3 years as primary system, I can reconfigure it every time I need, but other people require stability (and to be honest I am also tired, probably I won’t upgrade to 11.2). They just want secure, stable system with new software if needed.
On the other side I don’t understand version policy. What is “version”? Just another abstract definition. I’m working on 11.0, upgraded from 10.3 with KDE factory packages, openoffice 3.1, latest server software etc. So what version do I really have? I think we should redefine whole idea. Basic packages – those that make opensuse another distribution (like Yast) – should be upgraded on-the-fly, fluently (I see another advantage. Because You’re upgrading step-by-step You could easily catch bugs). Users, who need DVD image should use susestudio. It doesn’t make sense when You have to download old image and then redownload most of the packages because they are already outdated.

By: Chika

Chika — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 19:20:19 +0000

Playing devil's advocate here, would you consider that Windows Server 2008 is completely bug free? While I certainly think that it is much better than Vista, I don't think that anyone should be under any illusion that any OS is bug free. As someone once told me:- there is no such thing as a perfect program, just one that is in a high state of debug. The argument here isn't so much about what emerges from release but how long it is supported for once release happens. Something that comes to mind was the recent report of a serious security flaw in the kernel that dates back a lot longer than even the current coverage. Twas on The Register somewhere last week, ISTR.

By: SB

SB — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 17:00:03 +0000

Every time I upgrade OpenSuSE (not a new fresh install) I have to spend many hours to get everything to work again. Therefore I do not want to upgrade often. If the upgrade program were free of bugs I could change my mind. Hardly ever they test the upgrade option when reviewing a new Linux distribution. They always make fresh installs. I do not want to make a fresh install because I have installed many own programs and have many own personal settings.

By: Romanator

Romanator — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 15:05:05 +0000

Did you buy win 2008 with support or did you get Linux for free?

By: Dario

Dario — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 13:13:14 +0000

I don’t like the whole idea. First, create new version every six months even if it has lot of bugs. Second, shorten maintenance period. I prefer to work on stable, fully checked OS (and configured, it took me 6 months to check all configuration files, installed packages etc) rather than another test build. Just look at 11.1 – it has many issues that worked in 11.0 and what is strange, many packages in repositories are first updated for 11.0. Why should I select linux over win 2008 (8 months for test)?

By: Caro

Caro — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 01:15:10 +0000

David W,
Well put. You’re 100 percent right

By: Chika

Chika — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 08:38:19 +0000

Yeah, and we all know how busy IT managers are these days! ;)

Seriously though, if openSUSE wants to avoid “wingers”, announcements like that need to stop or at least need to be rethought. As for other distros, that’s all down to personal preference in the end. I’m not exactly new to openSUSE myself, jumping to it from Red Hat 5.2 of all places, and I have been relatively happy with it up to now but, like any distro (including ones with silly names such as Ubuntu which seems to please the great unwashed though I’ve yet to be impressed), dish up too many announcements that users don’t like and there are plenty of other places they might go to. You can call them anything you want but a distro stands or falls by the people who use it, not just those that develop it.

By: Happy Penguin

Happy Penguin — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 07:35:56 +0000

I can’t believe all you wingers, fair dinkum you get your operating system for nothing, the software that comes with it for nothing an all you can do is winge. I have used SuSE from way back when I had to buy it and let me tell you I have tried heaps of other Distro’s and have not yet found anything better ( and that includes Ubuntu ) Now how hard is it to install a new version every 18 months or so! all that you need to keep should be on your home partition or a separate drive, so where is the problem, if your an IT manager thats your job so don’t be lazy! and get over it