Effect of Novell's Buyout on Future of SuSE Linux

I wasn't aware of this!

CNET Article

So, what do you think will happen next?

I am Ignorance personified when it comes to the business side of things, but it seems like things would be very interesting if IBM obtained Suse. Please don't ask me why I think that, it's more of a gut feeling, not reasoned.

Overall it might have very little effect, since OpenSUSE is a community distro. The buying company can't come in, take the source away, and say the distro is dead.

IBM might also look at having its own linux as a good thing for mainframe sales.

I always though HP might be interested in Novell. Would make much sense IMHO, they could put HP-UX away, I think most customers prefer linux anyways. And the other products like identity manager etc. would fit into their portfolio, although HP has their own products for that purposes too.

I think if this happens it will be bad for Novell employees. It might effect areas that most people have come to expect as routine. Could be good or bad for openSUSE, hard to say. I am with bozo and eberhard in that I would prefer a recognized computer company buy out Novell rather than a obscure Hedge fund (Though a profitable one).

Could be SUSE will be sold as part of a breakup of Novell assets. I wonder who might acquire it?

MattB4 wrote:

I think if this happens it will be bad for Novell employees. ...

Yes, the hedge-fund might be the worst, since they are known for breaking up the companies they buy and then selling the corpse. But if eg. HP would buy Novell that might not be necessarily be good for the employees, seeing what happened to the EDS-people after the buy.

Well... I'm feeling so bad about opensuse... though it is still my favorite distro
I see few points that keep me thinking.. where is opensuse heading? Should I find myself another distro? (still don't feel comfortable about that... but the urge to find another distro is growing every day... because:

1- Look at the ranking of opensuse at http://distrowatch.com/, I remember it used to be on top not #4 (that's why I picked opensuse 10 years ago)
2- I feel the community of opensuse is... (I hate to say it), It is not the same community that used to be there 4 or 5 years ago... it gives me the impression of just being "customer service"
3- Does this have to do with the M$ - Novell agreement/alliance few years ago?
4- I just installed 11.3, I was shocked...! It has lots of serious bugs. Never since I started with suse 7.3 that a distro came out that buggy. Why?

I wonder... where would opensuse be 2 years from now..
Is there something to be done to rescue? Am I too pesimistic?

In regards to where Suse is heading I have to say that I think is trying to be thrashed out now with the strategy discussions. I think in the current economic environment has probably had more effect than anything else(Laying off of key oS staff). I also think this is related oS needs more contributors at the moment and due to lack of identity is struggling to attract them.

Just having a look as I started around 9.1(Full convert 9.3) I was surprised to see it was early Novell owned at that time I found Suse to be a different beast than openSuse is now then it was a little dated but stable and solid I recommended it to a few. Now it really does feel like a just another Fedora a little too cutting edge and too keen to embrace early tech. The the thing is I'm just not sure it has anything to offer different in that market, at least with fed it is power users who probably will or already do use RH/Centos in a commercial environment. The Centos is a good transition from a free os to a LTS to a commercial support contract. I just don't think Suse has any strengths to encroach on RH/Fed/Centos market.

But too me it was its Yast inclusion and its stability that I grew to enjoy, it was a professional, solid Desktop distro if slightly outdated, but it had a place(Free enterprise like Desktop distro). I remember the days when getting the latest KDE was no go now it seems the latest is what is included(I know hypocrite I am as an Arch user). For me all the tinkering that goes on under the hood which was one of Suse's strengths is now becoming a weakness as it tries to stay bleeding edge but is less vanilla than it could be.

My own opinion is the ones that are growing are the Windows convert distro's and the odd one from dissatisfied Ubuntu users. Though honestly I think the whole landscape is changing mobile devices(and that can be literally mobiles) are encroaching more and more on the desktop market and probably even on the laptop market.

On a final note I am bias KDE/Suse lost me around the 4.1 transition but many are praising the latest KDE offering. I just found it getting more and more bloated not to mention I've always had a little gripe about Suse's dependencies(Do a text only install and then add LXDE wtf is FF doing in that lot not too mention several dozen others, LXDE depends on little not a nearly a gig of deps iirc).

As for in 2 years time I suspec t some where in the Suse communtiy the disscusion will be taking place probably just as it could of been found 2 years ago Ad infinitum.

I agree Limo there are areas that Opensuse has fallen behind in terms of stability and ease of use. It has suffered from featureitis. That is the programmers adding new things instead of fixing the old problems. It has also lost quite a bit of the open community feeling.

After the last change they made to the Official Forum, I stopped reading it. I see little push to get people to adopt Opensuse as a Distro. Not sure where the drive to be the best went to.

MattB4, FeatherMonkey, I see now that it's not me who is too pesimistic and to criticizing... it's a fact that opensuse is fading out.

I wonder why did novell take that approach, laying off some people I can say o.k. (though I don't approve it because I can imagine keeping the high caliber guys at lower salaries - they would accept rather than being laid off- and eliminating luxury expenses and non very essential people, something like that)

The most disastrous thing they did was killing the community, converting it to a technical support... it sucks there.

Believe it or not, I read a "moderator" or something like that there in reply to a user to fix a problem, that he should update the system, restart the application... if it didn't work... restart the computer... sh**t... that's typical windoze... I doubt the got them from M$

I reinstalled 11.2 few hours ago... and unfortunately made some updates... the same sh*t happened as in 11.3

Maybe it is time realy to move to another distro... or back to 11.1?!
I wonder if Novell reads this forum and understand...

Are you still on opensuse guys?
If not.. what distro would you recomend (using KDE or similar), I'm thinking of ubuntu or opensolaris... what you think?

I am still on openSUSE 11.2. It works after you get it all tweaked in. I must admit I have not been doing much with it. Perhaps when Winter and the short days come around I will put some time back into keeping up.

Strangely enough I do not think Novell even pays attention to the Official Forum. At least they did not up to Spring this year when I stopped reading it. Maybe it is all Summer time slowdown or the economic blues but even Slashdot (the Forum) seems to have less Linux based discussions.

At any who, nice to have you back Limo to interject some life into the place.

I have not moved up to 11.3 yet, just haven't had time. I am still running 11.2 and 11.1 on my machines. I have found 11.2 to be solid on my laptop. KDE4 definitely takes some tweaking and getting used to. I'm still not as comfortable with it as the old 3.5, but its been working well for me. I can go to any distro forum and find people complaining about how their going down hill. The best you can do is try others and see if you find a new favorite. I keep coming back to suse because nothing else really excites me. Arch is probably my 2nd favorite, but its a PITA to setup.

limo wrote:

2- I feel the community of opensuse is... (I hate to say it), It is not the same community that used to be there 4 or 5 years ago... it gives me the impression of just being "customer service"
3- Does this have to do with the M$ - Novell agreement/alliance few years ago?

No! It has to do with Novell killing off two (tree) working independent forums and converting them into a Novell department. Being there is so much fun like work.

So, I wonder what can be done to save opensuse if Novell is not listening and adopting the same attitude of M$?

Personally limo I think you highlight the real problem Opensuse != Novell it is sponsored by them nothing more and it is this association that is hindering. It stalls the take up of community contributors as many perceive oS and novell to be the same but they're not oS will either live or die in the evolution of a distro because of community contributors and will not be dictated by Novell but by community contributors.

I actually think many users and the general perception is that oS is developed by Novell which just isn't close to the truth.

I have to agree with FM. Most do perceive that Opensuse and Novell are one entity.
But, because Novell provides finacial support for the OS they can also steer the evolution of it.
In the end tho it really is the community who decides.

OK then... we agree that opensuse does not belong to Novell as such, it belongs to the community. Right?

Then, let's take opensuse back!

Yes, why don't we start making our own .... our own distro, our own opensuse... our own linux distro... the way it should be.

It is easy I think.

Let us start as follows:
1- forget about all fancy features and eye candy of KDE 4.
2- specify the most stable:
a- kernel
b- KDE
c- Opensuse release (and/or individual apps)
3- put them together on a new cd

This way we will have the latest possible stable distro, well, let's call it something like "unbound linux" or... mmm.. Limo Linux

If we do this we should have our own repos so we won't update to something unstable.

Later on, we can look at the most stable KDE 4, plasma, eye candy... etc and try debug it.

I believe mint linux is based on ubuntu, so why not have unbound linux based on opensuse?

What you think guys?

Limo, you should look into the suse studio project. It allows you to create your own distro based on opensuse, and share the image you create. It also uses their bandwidth.

Thanks a lot bdquick, That's amazing... I just checked the screen cast!

thanks a lot.
I'll definitely make Limo Linux
But I wonder if "we" the unbound guys could put together the latest and most stable components?

I'm not that experienced under the hood.

Are the current problems related to kde4? which version is stable if any.. if it is related to plasma... can we use kde 4 without plasma...? or can I combine kde 3 with plasma... etc. I want "us" to do it. ( I will do mine on my own of course), what packages are most stable and more full-featured? If I want for example "empathy" from gnome under KDE, would it be compiled or what?... etc...

Let's together build Unbound Linux.. I suggest a community built iso would be much better than an individuals iso

And I assure you, I want our distro.. it will help all of us, help our community and our forum to pick up steam..

p.s.

I've noticed during the screen cast that it is mostly built on Novell's not on opensuse, does this mean that I won't get updates? and how to specify update repos... etc.

limo wrote:

1- forget about all fancy features and eye candy of KDE 4.
2- specify the most stable:
a- kernel
b- KDE
c- Opensuse release (and/or individual apps)

Btw. I like kde4 and I don't find 11.3 as bad as you make it. Of course there are some glitches like there always were immediately after the issuing of the new release, but it's easy to work around them. The kernel bug that leads to freezing is really bad but it's marked as critical in bugzilla and a fix will be shipped hopefully soon. Until then there is a workaround: you switch off the modesetting (which is the offending code) with the kernel parameter nomodeset. This will switch to the old drivers without modesetting and maybe switch off the fancy 3d-effects. But you said you could do without them.

I never intended to offend anyone.. just pointing where the bugs are.
It's just I never encountered a release since suse 7.3 with such flaws...
While I was on 11.3 I found on the web some solution somewhere... and I believe it fixed it.

I'm trying to reach the best stable configuration... whether it is 11.3 or 11.2

Well.. how stable is it with you now? What tweaks did you do?

limo wrote:

I've noticed during the screen cast that it is mostly built on Novell's not on opensuse, does this mean that I won't get updates? and how to specify update repos... etc.

p.s.

Sorry, I was wrong...

I just finished building my first custom iso... just to get the feeling of how to build

It looks easy and interesting... just needs to know more about what's under the hood.

but tell you what... although it is a great feature and looks realy easy to build a customized distro, I have to honestly mention 2 things:
1- I'm afraid that this will encourage "individual" thinking and suppress community thinking
2- As far I could see that I had not much choice to build from the distro I need... 11.1. or 11.2 were not available... (maybe I'm wrong).. been there only for few minutes.

I still believe a community distro would be better... maybe I'm wrong

Not sure what to say Limo you seem to be babbling(best intentions meant not trying to be insulting)...

I see this from the outside and with my biases what you're suggesting is a huge task not saying it is insurmountable but the questions I could ask to be considered would continue and continue...

Example eberhard mentioned the freezes this is affecting a fair few distro's and isn't oS specific but related to new tech being introduced which leads to an example question regarding the supposedly stable distro...

So do you support old or new take the intel mess at the moment iirc the main chip from 4-5 years ago is pretty much useless. For sure you could probably find a kernel and xorg etc.. that works but what about the new bits that would be unsupported. So do you support new hardware or old? I'm a competent user I could probably get my head around packaging for any distro but when it comes to backporting I wouldn't even know where to begin, so do you give up security for old?

oS is a community distro as Welan said for sure Novell does some steering but lets take for example the suggestion of Suse becoming a kde distro were this steered by Novell this strategy proposal wouldn't of even been voiced. It simply is the ones that "do" get to shape.

I can't really comment as my requirements from a distro have changed since I sung the praises of oS strangely enough the bleeding edge it is actually would fit me better but I just find the custom-ability is not what I want. I actually would of thought the zypper disaster of 10.1 was up there.

Maybe explain what you want from a distro and people can suggest a distro that better fits for example if kde3 then I would of thought Ubuntu with kde trinity. Maybe you just need to let Suse 11.3 settle it always takes a couple of months.