Battle of the Betas: Vista vs SLED

[Patrick]

http://www.crn.com/video/

The video is about 10 minutes long. Definitely worth a watch.

[Judland]

Wow, thanks Pat.

I'm e-mailing it around the office now.

[Tsuroerusu]

Definitely worth a watch.

In my opinion, Novell in general is worth a watch, they're doing a lot of cool stuff these days.

If SLED 10 is only 50 bucks, I might buy it, just for the heck of it and to play around with it.

[Patrick]

More praise for SLED:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/06/ ... led_1.html

[Tsuroerusu]

More praise for SLED:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/06/ ... led_1.html

Sounds like Novell is closer than anyone has been to creating something that can really be a serious contender for the business desktop.

Hey Pat, I expect a good review from you on it once it's released!

[Vogateer]

Well, now that they have a fix for YaST, that should fix the major gripe that I've heard about it. That and using smart as a package manager would probably be a beautiful thing. Once I'm able to wipe that windows partition clean, I'll probably try either Suse or Ubuntu first, not sure which one. That will be a joyous day, ridding myself of Win XP and having fun with a new distro all at once.

[Tsuroerusu]

Well, now that they have a fix for YaST, that should fix the major gripe that I've heard about it. That and using smart as a package manager would probably be a beautiful thing. Once I'm able to wipe that windows partition clean, I'll probably try either Suse or Ubuntu first, not sure which one. That will be a joyous day, ridding myself of Win XP and having fun with a new distro all at once.

We're talking about the upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, which is based on SUSE Linux 10.1, and even though that may not sound like a big thing, it's actually quite different, it has a customized GNOME that looks pretty slick along with other cool stuff.

Speaking of the package manager in SUSE 10.1, after applying the patches they released, it's not perfect yet, and it is still somewhat slow, but it works. But as long as you just use Smart, it's a great distribution.
I subscribe to the opensuse-commit mailinglist, and I've noticed a lot of changes to libzypp, zmd and other packages related to the package management stack recently, so they are working on it, which is good. Also, a few days ago, SUSE 10.2 Alpha 1 was released.

[Vogateer]

Whoa, should have been paying closer attention to that.

Will be interesting to see the differences between SLED and SUSE. May have to fork over some cash for SLED if it's slick enough. I do wonder about their choice of XGL, though, with AIGLX garnering more support from everyone else. I wonder if they'd be a little unhappy about switching later on if it becomes the standard for accelerated graphics. Probably not, though, since it's giving them the wow factor they were looking for at demonstrations. Who predicts them moving to AIGLX in time?

[Tsuroerusu]

Will be interesting to see the differences between SLED and SUSE. May have to fork over some cash for SLED if it's slick enough.

Should only be about 50 bucks, plus you can get a free trial I'm sure.

I do wonder about their choice of XGL, though, with AIGLX garnering more support from everyone else. I wonder if they'd be a little unhappy about switching later on if it becomes the standard for accelerated graphics. Probably not, though, since it's giving them the wow factor they were looking for at demonstrations. Who predicts them moving to AIGLX in time?

Since AIGLX is very far from being production ready, and won't work with any NVIDIA cards, or any newer ATi cards for a little while, and the fact that SLED 10 should be released in just about a month, I can guarantee you that Novell will be sticking with XGL for the time being, plus they're very late in the beta phases (I believe they're at beta 12 or 13), and I seriously doubt they wanna make a dramic change... again, and repeat the same mistake they did with the package manager in SUSE 10.1, but instead leave X as broken as the package manager was.

AIGLX will require ATi and NVIDIA to add support for a new X extension, GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap, for which the specification hasn't been finalized, and if NVIDIA did that today, it'd be like implementing 802.11n today and then it won't work with the final spec.
So, AIGLX has it's way to go, I'm sure it'd be be stable a little while after KDE 4.0 is released, but it's gonna take time, because it's such new code.

A thing I find a little, I won't say frustrating, but a little itchy is that both AIGLX and XGL currently has such a big focus on GNOME, if you run XGL on KDE, you basically get KDE with a window manager that draws heavily on Metacity, the GNOME window manager, which results in the virtual desktops not working, the system tray being screwed up and other quite large annoyances.

I can understand why Novell really want this 3D desktop stuff in their enterprise release, because it's something Microsoft is gonna tell it's customers is worth spending 400 bucks, or whatever price Vista is gonna have, on, and then, meanwhile, Novell can offer a product for around a tenth the price, that's more secure, more reliable, and does everything the user needs.

Also, when Novell releases their big new enterprise products, I'm sure a lot of regular Windows that don't wanna upgrade their hardware to run Vista, will see it and just try SLED 10 out, maybe not switch to it, but at least give it a try, since it does what Vista does with a lot less horsepower and frankly, better in my mind.

So, I say: Go for it Novell!

They can always use AIGLX in 18 months, when their Code11 products will be out, and by then I'm sure we'll have both XGL and AIGLX be stable and working on a much wider range of hardware, with more useful effects and good integration into both KDE and GNOME. Also, we'll have had several service releases for KDE 4.0 to fix bugs and add a few new features.
(To the GNOME users reading this: Since GNOME hasn't talked about a new major release, and frankly, havn't pointed out any really big new features, I didn't mention it above)

[Patrick]

Novell is doing a dog and pony show for SLED 10.0 in our neck of the woods at the end of the month. I'm planning on going to check it out. They're also doing an installfest for anyone who wants to partake.

[Tsuroerusu]

Novell is doing a dog and pony show for SLED 10.0 in our neck of the woods at the end of the month. I'm planning on going to check it out. They're also doing an installfest for anyone who wants to partake.

Cool, please do take a few pictures when you're there, and hey Pat, maybe you could even do an interview for TLLTS while you're there.