openSUSE 10.3: why did Novell ever bother?

Sam Varghese
Thursday, 11 October 2007 20:40

Opinion and Analysis

But 2007 is an entirely different story. This morning, when I booted up the PC on which I've installed 10.3, there was no GUI. The screen reported "out of range" indicating that something was amiss with the xorg.conf file which provides the parameters for the graphic interface.

Sure, I got it working again but that's not the point.

One of the reasons I use Linux is because of its stability - it may take time to get some things configured but once things are working, you don't have to mess around with them again. If changes are going to be incorporated into configuration files, you are always given fair warning while updating. On Debian, at least, that's standard behaviour.

I've never experienced this kind of behaviour - loss of a graphic interface overnight - with any distribution. And I've played around with a fair few over the last nine years. This year, Slackware, Linux Mint, PCLinuxOS, Mandriva, Ubuntu (a few versions), and a few of the BSDs have occupied space on my test PC.

One can understand why a company which sells a commercial distribution sets up a community project - to use developer talent from outside its ranks and to build an image. But if this is to succeed then the community product can't be half-arsed.

Novell has just tried to ape Red Hat's Fedora Core project but has forgotten that the latter has some pedigree when it comes to free and open source software. Novell is just another newcomer trying to push a product - and not bothering about anything except sales.

Maybe the people from Waltham (corrected) should just concentrate on selling the enterprise version of the Linux which they bought and leave this "community version" to die. But on second thoughts, if they did that they may well end up with very few users.