Chris, I think the most important issue for you as a business is that SLED HAS a life cycle and open suse has not. The issue of updates is not to be dismissed of easily- For example there was a rather large update to open office for 10,2 Open Suse, but this update was not made available to a 10,1 installation. You can only rely in critical security updates, however the open product has severe limitations.
The other major issue is support and as this will be a learning curve for admins, installers and staff acceptance. I can assure you, your staff will be very intolerant to any application paying up and if that issue causes a drop in productivity thee goes your business Model. Other issues may be with printer drivers, cost of non-open backup software (as retention comes into place) and your Quality System if you have one. You can have a kyocera printer which will have a PCL emulation and you can get by using the emulation driver, but heaven help you if you want to use multiple draws. The same is true for Postscript. Personally, if you do have a small degree of time I would wait until the next version of SLED. The advantage of being provided with support is not to be dismissed with - If you have an issue - you will get an answer within a few minutes. Depending on the size of your Business you could probably swing an in house Linux consultant free for 2 weeks if you purchase enough units - You have a great deal of bargaining power with Novell who I am sure would be more than happy to almost give you a Netware Server if you require one and provide connectivity shell to SLED in the very short future. If you have the luxury of some time wait for SLED 11 if not the Open Product would be a stopgap - however you will need to do some smart talking with Novell so that almost no money changes hand from the open product to the Commercial release product. Remember any issue with an open product normally takes a whole version or more to be fixed - You also need to give some thought on a standard of which desktop you want to use KDE/Gnome and here I would look carefully at progressive development of both desktops. Once a decision has been made you will probably never change as your users will all hate you and productivity go down the drain. The absolute crunch must be the normal continuous running of your business and that new investment is meeting or preferably enhance it. Chris & Steve wrote: > Hi everybody, > I have to ask this question with the hopes that somebody out there has > used SLED (Suse Linux Enterprise Destkop) and OSL (Open Suse Linux) > enough to know if SLED is really that much more refined and stable. > SLED currently is based on OSL's 10.1 build...with that in mind...would > anybody say that SLED is worth it for the support and other purks that > is being offered? > > I'm asking this question because we plan on offering Suse Linux as an > option to MS products on a new PC....should it be SLED or OSL? > > > Thanks Chris >
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