Hi James, > I've been a happy Debian user for nearly 4 years now and have no real > desire to switch distro's just for kicks and giggles.
I've done a few kicks and giggles distro switches in my time, they are fun for a while but one grows out of the habit. At one workplace I had a 40GB drive partitioned into 3 OSes- SuSE, RedHat and Debian (distros listed in order of how much time I spent in them) and nothing else. Now that's what I call a multiboot system! > However the company the currently pays my salary works very closely > with Novell and I was asked if I wanted a free, fully 'licensed' > copy of SuSE Professional (latest version, 9.1 IIRC). 9.1 is the latest SuSE yeah. If you decide not to install it and have a nice new copy of 9.1 Pro in your hot little hands and you don't know what to do with it email me off-list and I will suggest a good cause to donate it to :-) > I was to install it anywhere I wanted so my lappy and (just ordered) > Athlon64 system seem like reasonable candidates :) I like the idea of > 64bit apps ready to roll, the 2.6 kernel and KDE 3.2.2 etc. But is it > worth the switch? It's well worth having a look at for the reasons you mention- recent versions of everything. They put in a lot of testing and good stuff into SuSE, another of their philosophies is to package zillions of things into their distro so if you do a full install you'll be deluged in software. If you like configuring stuff by hand (debian user- yes you do) then stay away from the yast or yast2 program. New laptops, free SuSE professionals... where do I send my resume? Linus Torvalds runs RedHat at work and SuSE at home I believe it could be the other way around you can check on the web. There's an endorsement of RPM-based distros for you. > If you were given a similar offer to mine, would you "defect"? Whatever > your choice, what reasons? No troll - I've never used SuSE so I'm > curious about people's perceptions of not only the distro but also the > company behind it. It's all Linux at the end of the day, which means both that you should be willing to give SuSE a try and also that your management should be comfortable if you stay with debian. But you'll like SuSE if you give it a go, it's an important leading distro that'll give RedHat a run for its money. Stuart. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
