[Gllug] Novell abandoning SuSE customers?

[Christopher Currie]

SuSE Linux 9.2 came out in November, so I thought I'd look at
it with a view to upgrading my 9.0 system. 

What I found on the Novell website filled me with alarm:

There is no explanation of the difference 
between the 'professional' and professional upgrade versions.
The blurb is exactly the same for both. A customer who knows that
you often have to reinstall will not be able to guess which to buy.

Novell are clearly concentrating on their 'enterprise server' and
'Novell Linux Desktop' (for workstations in business offices).

The table of comparisons patronizingly describes the professional edition 
as a 'consumer product' for 'enthusiasts'. It doesn't guarantee
security patches. One could translate the 'professional' and
'student' editions as 'nerd's edition' and 'moron's edition'. 

Above all, the old table of packages, which told you what pigs each
poke contained, has been abandoned: there was a web page, which
was clearly working sometime in December, but it now produces a 404.
If they don't bring it back they've certainly lost a customer here.

PC World and Micro Anvika are still described as SuSE Linux resellers,
but I've not seen SuSE Linux for months in PC World, and Micro Anvika
assured me they have none in stock.

There are some good things, like the new SuSE fileserver for KDE and
Gnome upgrades, but one suspects that they are preparing to ditch
the individual customer if possible. 

It's almost incomprehensible. There are millions of Windows 98/ME users
out there who are facing an expensive upgrade to XP Service pack 2
plus new versions of Norton and other security packages, and probably
some of their applications software. A quarter
of the software shelf space in PC World is devoted to stuff whose sole
function is to fix defects in Windows (or their side-effects).
Firefox is gaining market share even on Windows systems.

By plugging a dual-boot option, a Linux distro like Suse with a fairly 
nontechie-friendly installer should be cleaning up  a great deal of
the market. Why are they doing the opposite?

Chris
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Christopher Currie	
ccurrie at bloxwich.demon.co.uk	
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