Novell Not Pushing Ximian Onto SuSE

dhunley writes "According to TechCentral, a recent story on Novell's plans following the acquisition of both SuSE and Ximian comments that 'SuSE will continue (to operate) as a business unit of its own', according to John Phillips, Novell's corporate technology strategist for the Asia Pacific region. 'We don't expect to make Ximian the default user interface, and for the medium term KDE will remain the default GUI on SuSE Linux'."

Novell showing wisdom

[Anonymous Coward]

No point trying to merge by force. Novell understands you can't take two things, and make them come together by force. I figure that eventually Novell will have SUSE using Ximian, but it won't be immediate. They may have made some bad decisions in the past, but Novell has learned.

Nothing new for middle term

[Anonymous Coward]

Well what do you expect? You really think Novell is ready to actually do anything? They are probably currently revamping the whole company, working hard on getting thier services completly linux integrated, and figuring out what the hell they still want and need to do.

Dont expect anything revolutionary from Novell in the middle term. In the long term, expect suse to disappear into novell completly and have a really tightly integrated set of OS+Services+GUI.

Love Hate With Novell

[SirChris]

I have always loathed working with Novell, in a business environment just because it complicated most things. Everything works easily on Windows but on novell well there were all these extra steps or dead-ends. When I heard someone had novell I cringed. Now, however, it would seem I'm hoping people end up with novell linux so I can do the linux side of things I could never do before. So I really did used to hate it but now I'm wishing for it.

Re:Novell showing wisdom

[VP]

Especially with the recent announcements [slashdot.org] of improved integration between KDE and Gnome, they may be able to do this in the future with little or no effort.

Re:Too bad. GNOME support in SuSE could be improve

[sorrodos]

I don't believe that if GNOME support would really "improve" if SuSE switches to GNOME as a default. In fact, that would only make me worry for the health of KDE. GNOME is already the default on RedHat/Fedora, so it has a major player backing it. And with the decision of Perens to use GNOME with the upcoming UserLinux, GNOME will probably pick up a good amount of additional development, especially if UserLinux succeeds where its meant to: the corporate environment.

Re:Things will change, just not right now.

[Ralph Yarro]

'We don't expect to make Ximian the default user interface, and for the medium term KDE will remain the default GUI on SuSE Linux.'

In other words, on the long term KDE will not remain the default GUI.

Correction: In the long term KDE may not remain the default GUI. This just isn't planned out yet and they'll see how the market and their products develop.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

> SuSE does not let you install a GNOME system without Qt. Why?

Likely because SuSE's admin tool, Yast, uses the Qt libraries for its GUI front-end. Yes, you can run Yast in text-mode, but Qt gets installed anyway.

Re:Things will change, just not right now.

[Tack]

'We don't expect to make Ximian the default user interface, and for the medium term KDE will remain the default GUI on SuSE Linux.' In other words, on the long term KDE will not remain the default GUI.

This is so frustrating. People do this all the time. Please, for the love of god people, take a course on critical thinking, or a discrete math course where boolean logic is taught.

Your words are not equivalent to what Novell has said. At best, you are making assumptions. Novell has not said what their long term plans are. They may set Ximian's desktop to be the default, or they may not. But you are simply plain wrong by saying "in other words ..."

Jason.

Re:Nothing new for middle term

[lcde]

Or expect Suse to be the 'fedora' while a Novell Linux becomes an Enterprise Edition.

Re:Balance

[Pionar]

The problem is that it is hard for them to justify buying something when it is freely available.

I don't think that's necessarily true. I'm not saying it isn't true for most companies, I just think it's not true for all. Redhat has made a good run at it. The thing a purchaser has to look at is not the OS by itself, which one can get for free, but the features that the company adds on to it, such as Redhat's RPM service and the user-friendly Anaconda installation system, both of which are open, but are in limited use by other distros. (I believe Yellowdog, or whatever it's called, the Linux for Mac processors, is the only other distro to use Anaconda). That ease of installation alone made me pop out the $30 for the boxed version of RH 8.0 when I went hunting for my first Linux installation.

Other companies that incorporate Linux into their service offerings, such as IBM, use Linux as a baseline for their services, so that you're not paying for Linux, you're paying for IBM's services.

I would be led to think that Novell's main channel of pushing the SuSe product would be through Novell's own consulting business, where SuSe Linux would be a value-added service, not the main dish. So, in other words, you wouldn't be ordering Linux with a side of Novell, you'd be ordering Novell with a side of Linux.

Re:Things will change, just not right now.

[osewa77]

In all the ways that matter Ximian is "the gnome company". Check out some of their products [ximian.com]. Unless there's something I am missing, why would Novell acquire Ximian and not intend to have a Linux Desktop plan centred around Ximian Desktop?

Re:Honestly.

[The One KEA]

The nature of OSS and the GPL mean that if SuSE start to go downhill or include crapware and bloat and other junk that no one wants, then the community will take the SuSE source code and start a new distro - the name "NeuSE" comes to mind for such a project.

But I doubt that will happen - corporate memory can last a long time, and hopefully Novell has learned from their mistakes in the past and will try their best to keep SuSE as autonomous as possible. I'm sure the art and branding of SuSE will change, but if the execs at Novell have learned any lesson, let's hope they learned not to mess with a good thing.

OpeneXchange Server

[23skiddoo]

My worry is that SuSE will be stong-armed into dropping OpeneXchange Server in favor of Novell's own groupware suite....

Re:Love Hate With Novell

[diersing]

I realize that is the Slashdot Correct thing to say, but it still seemed a blantant MS Bash (and promoted to "informative" to boot, tsk tsk).

I work and have worked in MS shops that were secure, stable, reliable, scalable and ran high performance/high demand database (SQL) and web (IIS) services to its financial customers.

I don't fault your POV, but MS has improved its responsiveness and I almost seperate Windows 2003 Server from its previous offerings because its more Linux like - disabled by default approach.

I think the acquisition of SuSE and Ximian are great moves for Novell, but I also think they're competing more with RH and IBM then MS at this point.

Re:Novell showing wisdom

[ajs318]

Exactly ..... better integration between KDE and GNOME can only be good for both parties. It's a win-win situation, but it doesn't stop anyone wanting a bigger win for their side!

Novell might be doing the wise thing by sitting on the fence for awhile. They will be continuing to fund GNOME through Ximian while KDE gets attention from paid-for distributions such as Lindows and Xandros. Even if they choose just to cream off the best bits for SUSE, the beauty is that none of the effort is really wasted -- it just stimulates competition between developers. When the initial bugs get worked out, the product of GNOME/KDE integration may well be something special. Also, now KDE has been compiled for MacOSX, that paves the way for the "ground-up" replacement for X11 everyone seems to have been threatening -- there will actually be an application to run on top of it! It will be interesting in the least to see what comes out of that.

Re:The "merging" of GNOME and KDE

[Erik Hensema]

If KDE or GNOME start to bloat or stagnate or become unsuitable, then I'm sure the three window managers I just mentioned might just see an increase in users.

Not going to happen. Old style window managers only attracts geeks and nerds, not regular users. On the end user desktop the traditional window manager is dead and buried.

But just FYI: the upcoming KDE 3.2 is WAY faster than KDE 3.1.

Re:Love Hate With Novell

[natd]

Dropping back to the DOS prompt gave you access to NOTHING which the login was designed to protect. You simply decided not to login, end of story.