Whats the difference between OpenSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop?

One Comment

1. mr. c says:

   11. September 2009 at 01:23

   obviously, OpenSuSE can be downloaded, installed and maintained completely for free.
   for the Price of the Enterprise Desktop… you can download, install and maintain your desktop.

   difference?
   well, if you have a 110% standard (XP) home PC and don’t plan on doing any fancy things (over clocking, playing LostDOS games aso.), OpenSuSE will be just fine as YaST2 will keep your system up to date.
   BUT (!): the free support has its limits; to give you an example, i’m running OS 10.2 on a PC that i bought / assembled a few month ago. last week, i got into a situatioin where i didn’t have any sound anymore. what had happend? after some GOOGELING (yup, if you run into any trouble with OpenSuSE, that’s where you have to go…) it turned out that the latest KERNEL upgrade that YaST2 had downloaded isn’t compatible with the sound module build into my motherboard.
   solution? upgrade to an even never KERNEL version.
   no good, because the manufacturer of my video card (NVidia) has decided not to support newer kernel versions on 10.2, but to switch to 10.3.
   as i’m not yet convinced that 10.3 is stable enough for what i do, i’ll stick with 10.2 for now and had to use a backup to get the older KERNEL (and sound) back and block the KERNEL against updates.

   and SLED?
   well, a NVidia 8800 isn’t exactly a business desktop graphic card, thus chances are that i would run into the same problem with SLED 10 SP1 (which is + or – equivalent to OS 10.2) but, as a company with a support contract from Novell (for SLED) i could call Novell and ask them to find a solution.

   is it worth 50 bucks for a year (125 for 3)?
   probably not. as a private citizen, Novell will most likely advise you to stay with the older kernel and wait for the next release (10.3) which you might get at a discounted price (like any other SLED 10 SP1 customer…). and left with the trouble to upgrade your 10 SP1 to 10.3 >¦-) even though, before they start to sell upgrades from 10SP1 to 10.3, Novell is probably going to make sure that most upgrades work with a minimum of hasle, whereas an upgrade from OS 10.2 to OS 10.3……..

   bottom line:
   you get what you pay for. and for free, you get very little, in terms of support. for example, only OS 10.2 and 10.3 (and 11.0 alpha) are currently supported, thus if you installed your OpenSuSE PC about 2 yrs ago (with OS 10.0 or 10.1), you simply can’t downlaod any patches anymore……. and have to upgrade to 10.3, as 10.2 will not be supported anymore, once 11 is released (this sommer, at the latest)