MadOnion posted a review of SUSE Linux 9.1 (site down, slashdotted) and while I skimmed over it, curious about what is going on in the Linux world, some quotes in the summary caught my eye…
“SUSE LINUX 9.1 is an excellent Linux distribution for the price. At $89.95 USD, you would be hard pressed to find a better package. Sure, you can download Linux all day long from the Internet for free, but in no way does that give anything back to the developers who innovate. You are showing support for them by running and promoting their software to others, but nothing helps keep development flowing like cold hard cash. SUSE is worth the price. For the 90 days of installation support, online and email support, as well as the plethora of packages that are included, you simply can’t go wrong”
“So many distros these days have apps that are just ‘broken’, not working, and trouble to work with. I visited as many apps as possible during my review and everything worked. This to me is a huge selling point.”
“While I love the power that Linux gives me to compile my own software from source and configure it to my liking, I am starting to realize that the time it takes to get everything running the way I like it is at a premium. I could spend this time doing other things like playing hide and seek or reading story books with my daughter. SUSE gives me these opportunities. They have built a desktop system that works very well out of the box. Almost everything is configured the way I need it to be, hardware is simple to manage, and while software management can come a long way with online updates I can live with it. Within a minimal amount of time I can have a SUSE system running with all the applications I could need, all working, and still have the power to compile and configure my own software exactly as I see fit. Gone are the days of fighting with 3D drivers. nVIDIA drivers installed easily through YOU (or from nVIDIA’s site). Everything simply worked.”
Kind of sounds like Mac OS X, doesn’t it? 🙂
Alright, so Mac OS X only runs on Macs, and not any old PC, but come on, that is one of the reasons our Macs “just work” That to me is a selling point. 🙂