SUSE Linux 9.2: Let the Branding Begin! - page 6

Differentiating Novell and SUSE

SUSE has always been a good desktop distribution, and I've used it for a long time on some of my machines. However, given Red Hat's abandonment of an official desktop distribution in single-user quantities, I think SUSE is my new standard distribution everywhere. SUSE was one of the first commercial distributions (along with Mandrake) to support 64-bit machines, which they do flawlessly. This was my original motivation for buying the last few SUSE releases, now that I no longer get free review copies. But I'm OK with that--getting value for money seems to work. I can't say enough good things about SUSE 9.2 on my 64-bit Athlon system except to add that I would like AMD to have my children and that I feel sorry for that Itanium guy who lives in a cardboard box on the edge of town.

SUSE 9.2 is robust, complete, and well thought out. It now says Novell, but that's a good thing. Novell has the budget, the motivation, and the enterprise experience to help SUSE be more than it might have been otherwise. If you're looking for a supported, complete, commercial Linux distribution, look at http://www.novell.com/linux/suse/index.html. Between products such as SUSE 9.2, SUSE Enterprise Server, and the promise of future versions of NetWare hosted on Linux (guess which flavor), I think that we'll all be seeing a good bit more of SUSE in the future.

Bill von Hagen is a coauthor of Wiley's upcoming SUSE Linux 9 Bible with Justin Kent and Roger Whittaker.