The times, they be interesting
Momentus events in the Linux world today. Novell has bought Suse, and RedHat has officially dropped it’s desktop “product”.
The Novell deal is interesting for a lot of reasons. First, it gives Suse a huge enterprise customer base and a support machine. Novell has over 1200 people just doing support! Second, it shows that Novell is really committed to Linux. They bought Ximian earlier this year, which gives them arguably the best GUI, and now Suse, which gives them one of the best Linux distros. With Novell’s reputation for solid networking products, this could result in a huge jump in Linux adoption in the enterprise, especially considering the EOL of NT products recently announted by Microsoft.
Yet another interesting aspect of the Novell/Suse deal is that Suse has traditionally been a KDE distro, while Novell bought Ximian, which is Gnome. This means that Suse will likely switch from KDE as it’s primary DE to Ximian. Oh, I know they’re all saying that they will continue to use KDE, but they won’t. The KDE lovers definitely won’t like this. Still, maybe this will signal more work towards unifying the DEs on Linux. That would be great.
RedHat dropping it’s non-enterprise (read Free) Linux distro is another interesting, if not suprising, move. RedHat is finally realizing that they won’t make any money “selling” a box set that anyone with broadband can download and burn themselves, and have decided to EOL the product. The surviving offering of RedHat is something called Enterprise Linux. No free downloads of that.
What does this mean for us Linux users? Well, if you currently use RedHat as your desktop, and you like to keep current (IE, you’re running 8 or 9), then you’ll have to find an alternative. The alternative being pushed by RedHat is Fedora, the community supported RedHat based varient that is now being pseudo-run by RedHat. I suspect this will really result in people fleeing to other distros entirely. Most techies will probably go to Debian or Gentoo. Non-techies will probably hit up Mandrake or Suse. Me, I use Gentoo already, so this is not an issue for me.
For current corperate RedHat users, this means one of two things: move the Enterprise, with it’s higher cost, or leave for something else, probably Suse. This is where the Novell deal becomes interesting, because it makes Suse that much more attractive for people being EOL’d by RedHat. I suspect that Suse will be the corperate Linux desktop of the near-to-mid future.
All in all, an interesting time in Linux.
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