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SuSE Businesses

SuSE Linux Desktop 1.0 Reviewed 212

Posted by timothy from the screenshots-o-plenty dept.
LinuxLasVegas writes "SuSE announced a new release today titled "SuSE Linux Desktop 1.0". The distro is built on SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8.x technology and comes with Crossover Office 2.0. Mad Penguin has the first review of this release. From what I read, it seems like a good release, but for the $600 price tag, I'm not sure if it would be worth the jump..."
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SuSE Linux Desktop 1.0 Reviewed More

SuSE Linux Desktop 1.0 Reviewed

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  • actualy, it is $99 (Score:4, Informative)

    by the_2nd_coming ( 444906 ) on Monday June 09, 2003 @06:32PM (#6156484) Homepage
    and bundled WITH the mantenance package it is $600

  • $600 Bucks? (Score:3, Funny)

    by SomeOtherGuy ( 179082 ) on Monday June 09, 2003 @06:32PM (#6156487) Journal
    Wow. I guess they want the crowd that thinks xp and 2000 is to cheap.

    • Re:$600 Bucks? (Score:2, Informative)

      by HaeMaker ( 221642 )
      This includes Office.

      XP and Office XP is approx. $900.

    • Re:$600 Bucks? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MyPantsAreOnFire! ( 642687 ) on Monday June 09, 2003 @07:04PM (#6156772)
      Well, to a certain extent, you're right.

      Corporate users and decision-makers are particularly averse to "free" things, because of the perception that things that are free come with some sort of gimmick, trick, or legal gotcha.

      Offering the same product to them at a sizeable price tag (it looks like the OS itself is $99, whereas the maintenance add-on is $500 more) gives the illusion of value, or addition, or more importantly, accountability.

      In the corporate world, it's all about who you can blame when the shit hits the fan. If your whole windows network goes down, and your group loses 5 days of work time, you can say "microsoft is to blame! sue them!" and your boss doesn't fire you. If your whole *nix network goes down, and you downloaded the OS for free, you have no one to blame, and you get a pink slip.

      The most important piece of the SuSE corporate invasion is the fact that decision-makers now have someone to call or point the finger at when something goes wrong.
      • Offering the same product to them at a sizeable price tag (it looks like the OS itself is $99, whereas the maintenance add-on is $500 more) gives the illusion of value, or addition, or more importantly, accountability.

        I'm sorry, but +5 for that?

        There's no illusion of value here - it's about selling maintenance and support of the product, which business demands.

        A case in point - I encouraged my current client to use Putty on Windows for SSH. Corporate policy dictates that all software must be supported,
        • I misstated the point I was trying to get across, then, because I believe we're saying the same thing. My point was that anything that is free in the corporate world is treated like the plague because it rarely has support, or accountability behind it.

          You're very right -- I never said that support contracts don't outweigh software costs for corporate clients. But free software rarely, if ever, has organized and consistent support that can be held liable for failures and training.

          If SuSE gave the maint

    • Re:$600 Bucks? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by RoLi ( 141856 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @04:33AM (#6159282)
      Well 5 licenses of XP and 5 licenses of Office XP cost somewhere between 2000$ and 3000$ without any support.

      If you want a year of support from MS, I would guesstimate that you would end up paying at least 6000$ for 5 seats or 10 times of what SuSE charges.

      SuSE's offering isn't meant for home users, it targets businesses which don't have much Linux experience and will need both much support to make the jump and also a possibility to run at least the most important MS apps.

      For that niche (and only for that niche) SuSE's offer isn't a bad deal, IMO.

    • For five seats that comes to only 120 per seat. Add in the the fact that you do not need to buy MicroSoft office it is not a bad price. Add in the year of support and it is a not a bad deal. It is not for the hacker at home it of for companies.
      One thing I wonder about. I heard Microsoft get bent over someone running Visual Foxbase on Linux. Could they start telling people that they can not run Office under wine or using the crossover plug in?

  • $600? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by angryLNX ( 679691 )
    It looked to me on the website that the price was listed as $99... is $600 with support and such?
  • Why does this cost $600?? I read the first two pages of the review - excellent point about how deep CrossOver puts some items by defautl - but didn't see an explanation of the cost.

    • As others have stated, the $600 is the cost for the media and maintenance for 5 seats, which also includes the rights to connect to their groupware and enterprise server without requiring an existing client access license. The cost for five client access licenses for OpenExchange server is $249, per this page [suse.com].
    • excellent point about how deep CrossOver puts some items by defautl - but didn't see an explanation of the cost.

      What do you except, it basically mirrors the start menu on windows. There is an entry for windows programs, and then its the same hierarchy it is under the windows start menu.

  • MIRROR LINK (Score:5, Informative)

    by TheMadPenguin ( 662390 ) on Monday June 09, 2003 @06:33PM (#6156501) Homepage
    Just in case ;)

    http://www.madpenguin.org/slashdot/sld10.html [madpenguin.org]

  • SuSE's price (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 09, 2003 @06:34PM (#6156508)
    This price includes the maintainance price. Problem is, you can't buy the software all by itself, so it does costs as much: $600. That's too much IMHO. SuSE Linux PRO costs $79. I would pay up to $150-200 for it cause of all the commercial apps included, but not a cent more.

    • Re:SuSE's price (Score:4, Informative)

      by the_2nd_coming ( 444906 ) on Monday June 09, 2003 @06:39PM (#6156559) Homepage
      this is comercial and included 5 licenses (which are required for the bundled proprietary apps)

      so for a corprate environmnet this is fine.

      • Re:SuSE's price (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I don't know how you can say this is fine. So, this includes 5 licenses of Crossover plugin. That is about $250 extra bucks for the SuSE product.

        Guess what pal. Windows XP does not need the Crossover plugin. It runs Windows apps... natively. And businesses don't pay for more than $150-200 bucks for XP PRO when they buy volume for enterprises.

        In other words, this SuSE product is just stupidly expensive at $600. They shouldn't have created that particular product in the first place, because it can't compete

        • Re:SuSE's price (Score:3, Insightful)

          by thasmudyan ( 460603 )
          Well, I have my doubts about the crossover plugin as well (but it's still nice to be able to run Photoshop), but for 600 $ this comes with a lot of software that you would have to buy seperately if you're using Windows. Besides, the price includes 1 year 5-client technical support, enterprise-grade, which is the main selling point.
          • Don't you still need to buy a license of each app you want to run with the Crossover plugin?
            • You mean "crossover office", "crossover plugin" is for web browser viewers. Also, yes, you need licenses for MS-Office / Photoshop and any other non-free software you want to run on crossover office. That said, crossover office 2.0 is a remarkable improvement over the 1.x builds. The 1.x build had issues with OLE and cutting and pasting of OLE objects. I used to recommend using Win4Lin for running MS-Office but with the 2.0 release, the difference in stability when running MS-Office between a native Windows

        • Yeah.. but to run XP, you gotta run *Windows*. By running Crossover Office you get some of the benefits of Windows (ubiquitous software), without most of the downsides (viruses, henious license agreements, vendor lock-in, privacy issues, reliability issues, crappy file systems, lack of built in software). Of course, by running Windows software you're introducing some of these downsides to your systems -- but probably not as much as running the same apps on Windows.

        • The $600 is for 5 seats. So that works out at $120 per seat, and therefore cheaper than Windows XP even at enterprise discount prices.

          Also bear in mind that to get those enterprise discounts from Microsoft you have to be buying at enterprise volumes, usually thousands of seats. If you're buying 5, 10, 20 seats then you're probably paying list prices. I'd be very suprised if Suse didn't also offer volume discounts to enterprise level buyers which makes it an even better proposition for the big customers

    • Re:SuSE's price (Score:3, Insightful)

      by thasmudyan ( 460603 )
      The way I see it, the maintainance service is an integral part of the product. If you don't need this service, I would suggest downloading SuSE 8.2 for free from their FTP server and install that. This Desktop 1.0 product seems really geared for the small/medium the enterprise market where capable Linux admins are not very common, so a company wants to buy the all-in-one-everything-will-be-taken-care-of package. With this product, SuSE is offering those needed services in standardized packages. That's all.

  • Free as in speech (Score:5, Insightful)

    by madgeorge ( 632496 ) on Monday June 09, 2003 @06:40PM (#6156572)

    I don't care about the price tag as much as I care about the philosophy. OSS is primarily about free as in speech, not free as in beer. Same as Red Hat Enterprise, the price tag allows them to offer you support and stability, things they don't have the financial resources to provide without charging for the service.

    This is aimed at the enterprise customer who is looking for culpability in their vendors and a certain level of support. Hats off to them... I hope Linux becomes a profitable offering for the vendors pursuing it.

    --madgeorge

    • Re:Free as in speech (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Unfortunately, idealism isn't reality. The mythical Joe Six pack could care less about "Freedom" they care about 1 thing. Getting free stuff. The more free stuff the better. Why do you think we see the word "FREE!!!" everywhere. People want free stuff.

      The Philosophy of "free software" really only matters to people who write software; no one else cares if they have the source code.

      This is the reason why Linux and the GPL are evil. People love free things. What they don't realize is that there's a st
      • freedom and freestuff are mutual and benefit both parties. You need the freedom to get free stuff in the first place. Joe sixpack may not understand the internet or why it was built, but he knows theres lots of free music and movies on it and he likes it.

        Thats all someone like him needs to know, but because he likes this freedom he will not want to be robbed of that freedom anytime soon.

        Its all a matter of marketing, stuff like Gnutalla, Waste, and other P2P filesharing apps introduce the concept of shari

    • Re:Free as in speech (Score:3, Insightful)

      by malraid ( 592373 )
      You are right about the free as in speech vs. free as in beer. But I feel that this is really a bad business move. It's different with Red Hat Enterprise, it costs $600 (unlimited clients) vs $1000 for Windows 2000 (with 5 CAL) Would you consider a $600 desktop vs. a $200 one (Win XP Pro)? Philosophy doesn't go THAT far for my. Service is ok, and it has a price, but $600 is too much for a DESKTOP (not so mission critical) distro.

      I personally would consider buying RH Enterprise, but I would never consi

      • Re:Free as in speech (Score:4, Insightful)

        by dmaxwell ( 43234 ) on Monday June 09, 2003 @07:32PM (#6157002)
        RTFA. That's $600 for enterprise level support for 5 clients. Granted, that leaves room to argue for RedHat but it's certainly competitive with Windows 2000 + 5 cals ($1000).
      • Given I am going to get my employer to pay $400 for VMware, so that I can run all my winapps, I can say that paying for stuff can be justified. But that is a special case - I am paying not just to get outlook and the rest of office to work, but for the ability to have a disk full of different OS images and then write and debug complex windows apps/device drivers and not even have to blink when an OS image bluescreens on me.

        Otherwise, well, $600 is a lot for any OS these days, given you can buy a reasonable
    • Exactly - with a real $ price attached to this, along with support and services this will (hopefully) become a credible desktop OS candidate for corporates.

      I'm not saying that roll-your-own or distro X is not suitable, but in the eyes of the corporate buyer support and services are part of the package.


    • I don't care about the price tag as much as I care about the philosophy. OSS is primarily about free as in speech, not free as in beer.

      Now, now - wouldn't want to get RMS mad at you, now. "Open Source" is more about "gratis" - it's the "Free Software" folks who are more interested in "libre".

  • What's really needed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday June 09, 2003 @06:49PM (#6156648)
    isn't a review of the distro (which is just SuSe 8.2 + Crossover near as I can tell) but of the support. i.e. how useful is it, how easy is it to get a tech on the phone when need be, how quickly do patches come out and how easy are they to apply/do they break things. For us home desktop users this is pretty meaningless, except as it pertains to getting linux a foothold in the corporate sector.

    This is a package for corporate computers, so of course it's overpriced. Corperations have always payed way more than software was worth. It's a throwback to the days when software was harder to write and software engineers were a lot scarcer, I think. Or maybe they're just dumb and ignorate about technology (probably both).

  • Germany special? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by yanestra ( 526590 ) * on Monday June 09, 2003 @06:50PM (#6156665) Journal
    SuSE is a German company ("System und Software Entwicklung GmbH"), and you see it clearly with the price:

    The more it costs, the more it is of value, most of German managers seem to think. (And others, I have heard...)

    Hmmm, but... I read something of about 129 Euros, where's the rest going now?

    • Re:Germany special? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by thasmudyan ( 460603 ) <thasmudyan@opREDHATenfu.com minus distro> on Monday June 09, 2003 @07:07PM (#6156803)
      As a german I can only agree, it's kind of a leftover IBM mentality of sorts. Profesisonal solutions are only acceptable if they're expensive and they have to come from megalomaniac companies. If it doesn't cost enough, it can't be worth very much...
      But SuSE is not one of those companies! Actually, the cited 600,00 price is for a package including support costs for five clients for a year, so you'll find that for an office solution it isn't that expensive. (But I would still prefer the "normal" 8.2 version.)
      • Hmmm, think of it as insurance.
        When and if things go wrong, your insurance company needs to be very well heeled. They (with coinsurers, it's a they) need to be able to pay off if the big one hits.
        For the businesses to not get short-changed (when it needs it most), this needs to be profitable, almost lucrative for SuSE. One thing about IBM of old (and probably still), if they had to, they can move. They do have the resources. I've seen IBM move. Once long ago. A one-bit patch to IBM's COBOL compiler so it wo
  • It's happened at last: the cost of enabling software is greater than the cost of the hardware. This is true for a US$600 OS+basic s/w package that can run on a modest but new x86 box bought from a well known vendor.

    It just might be worth it. But I'd spend an extra US$200 and get an eMac from Apple; an OpenBSD base, plenty of bundled applications, and a decent all-in-one system to boot.

    Either way, it can still be entirely free from Microsoft applications.
    • Where do you get 5 boxes for $600? This is what you buy here, software that's licensed to run on 5 seats concurrently.
    • In many cases this has been true for many years.

      The cost of the workstation (anywhere between $600 and $1500) has often been far outweighed by the cost of (for example):

      1. Windows desktop OS

      2. Windows Server client access license

        MS SQL Server CAL

        MS Office license

        MS Exchange license

        MS SMS license

        ...

      :) It's nice to see that now with Suse Desktop you get all of this for a significantly lower price point.. and it's free (speech)..

    • That 600 bucks covers five seats. I just built a nice mid-level machine and it cost me 550 bucks sans monitor. So, for business purposes, add at least $100 for the monitor. All that times five is $3,250.

      Let's see... yep, $3,250 is greater than $600.

      Looks like you're wrong on this one. Unless you mean software for Windows, in which case you'd be right.

      And you may be right about the Mac too. I saw one the other day and was suitably impressed. But for now, I'll stick with x86 because the Mac doesn't offer m
  • What's the deal with version 1.0? Did they wrap around the data type holder with their constant version upgrades and have to wrap around?

  • $600 is for 5 Clients (Score:5, Informative)

    by kikensei ( 518689 ) <<joshua> <at> <ingaugemedia.com>> on Monday June 09, 2003 @06:56PM (#6156696) Homepage
    $99 for the media. 499 for a 1 year maintenance license for FIVE clients. You only have to buy the $99 media kit once, so essentially its $100 per client for all the crossover stuff.

    • Re:$600 is for 5 Clients (Score:3, Insightful)

      by lspd ( 566786 )
      $99 for the media. 499 for a 1 year maintenance license for FIVE clients. You only have to buy the $99 media kit once, so essentially its $100 per client for all the crossover stuff.

      You left out the key part that it's $100 per client per year. WinXP + OOo is quite a bit cheaper over the life of the OS. Debian/Slack/Gentoo/etc + OOo completely blow it away. Do you honestly expect $99 support to amount to much more than eratta packages, forums, mailing lists and email access to the package maintainers?

  • Whoa (Score:3, Funny)

    by The Bungi ( 221687 ) <thebungi@gmail.com> on Monday June 09, 2003 @06:56PM (#6156705) Homepage
    $600 price tag

    Them's some purty expensive blank CD's!!

  • Windows XP Home Edition -- $179.00
    Office XP Standard -- $342.00

    Price -- $521.00

    Still cheaper than the Linux solution, PLUS it has all that fun Microsoft cross program functionality.

    I guess the question is raised to on why chose a $600 OS package to run programs that are designed for another OS?

    Stability? I'm guessing this is a very arguable reason. I mean, I'm not going to claim to be the worlds smartest software developer, but i know that programs running in an emulated environment are often slower and

    • Re:All to run windows programs? (Score:5, Informative)

      by BenjyD ( 316700 ) on Monday June 09, 2003 @07:08PM (#6156813)
      RTFA. That's five client licences, including support and updates for a year. Compare that to Microsoft's plans - maybe $2000 for the same setup, still with their $50-per-call support service.
    • actually, you should multiply your MS figure by 5.
      SUSE come with 5 lisences.
    • Windows XP Home Edition -- $179.00 Office XP Standard -- $342.00 Price -- $521.00 Still cheaper than the Linux solution

      The Suse price was for 5 licenses, so multiply your $521 by 5 and try again.

    • Dude, You should multiply your figures by 5. Five licenses for Windows XP plus office XP will be $2605. This is without any support. SuSE is giving a OS plus a bunch of software (office, image manipulation, etc ) for $600. And this is for 5 licenses, including 1 year support.
      So on one hand you have $2605 for office and OS, without support, on the other hand you have $600 for office and OS and a bunch of applications, plus support. I call the SuSE offering, very cheap, and very strategically priced.
  • Comparing the components lists from MadPenguin (for Linux Desktop 1.0) to those from SuSE (for Linux Office Desktop 8.1), [suse.com] I'm not quite getting the difference. The latter product retails for $129, which is much more reasonable than the $600 quoted at MadPenguin.

    Can someone please explain? Thanks.

    -renard

  • CrossOver comes in Xandros Desktop Deluxe 1.0 and that distro includes XFS file system that integrates well with MS domains, if that's what you want. Also, CrossOver is a seperate product that can be installed on almost any Linux distro. It's hard to imagine that Linux user would pay for desktop distro $600, no way Jose.

  • The point (Score:4, Informative)

    by Nex6 ( 471172 ) on Monday June 09, 2003 @07:06PM (#6156785) Homepage
    it says there are 5 licenses that come with it.

    and this is targeted at bissness's who buy in bulk anyways. so this is a good deal.

    comes out to $100 per seat with support not bad....

    -Nex6

  • OK, by this (Score:3, Interesting)

    by geekoid ( 135745 ) <{moc.oohay} {ta} {dnaltropnidad}> on Monday June 09, 2003 @07:16PM (#6156878) Homepage Journal
    then sell the 4 remiaining liscenses to someone else.
    Or get 5 buds to all chip in.
  • The press release says that SuSE Desktop 1.0 works with SuSE's Enterprise OS, but doesn't mention any 64-bit CPUs (Opteron, Itanium, etc).

    LinuxLasVegas says, "The distro is built on SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8.x technology"... which means it would have native support for the Opteron.

    Not sure who's right here - this looks like a workstation OS, and thus limited to 32-bit. That might change once the Athalon64 comes out in a few months, I guess.

  • The Price tag (Score:3, Interesting)

    by !Squalus ( 258239 ) on Monday June 09, 2003 @07:41PM (#6157059) Homepage
    Includes support for 3 years (w/updates) and 5 licenses I believe. It's some kind of SMB thing similar to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

    Just from what I have read from SuSE. This addresses the fact that Business Users are muvh different than the retail market.

    These are smart business models for the SMB market. The only market that matters right now. The big boys spent their wads - now everyone has to compete for real - not just on advertising.
  • This link is to a "different" product, actually it is the same, different box.
    http://www.suse.com/us/private/products/suse _linux /office_desktop/index.html
    Let the frenzy begin.

  • This is MUCH CHEAPER than Windows (Score:5, Informative)

    by scarpa ( 105251 ) on Monday June 09, 2003 @08:33PM (#6157378) Homepage
    Enterprise means Big Company. So stop thinking in terms of a single desktop, or even 5. Lets start at a departmental level and say 100 clients. Windows Windows XP Pro - ~$100 Office XP Pro - ~$200 (being generous) Client Access License - $15 (you do use servers right?) Total per client: $315 Total @ 100 clients: $31,500 Suse Media Kit - $99 10 Seat Client License - $899 Total per client: ~$91 Total ~ 100 clients: $9089 Looks cheaper to me...

  • Can't they compete with Ximian? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by EarthTone ( 12574 ) on Monday June 09, 2003 @09:06PM (#6157586)
    What I would like to see is SuSE (or someone else) take KDE to the level Ximian is pushing GNOME. SuSE would have the clear advantage of being an end-to-end solution provider, and could integrate KDE deeply with the rest of the OS. A (more) polished, integrated KDE desktop targeted to enterprise (and even small) businesses...especially if they can extend the capabilities of the Kiosk framework (esp. for organizations serving the public, like schools, libraries, etc.). Tight OpenOffice integration would be integral, too. I'd do it if I was a millionaire...
  • I remember when people griped about the price of Mac OS X 10.2/Jaguar. I thought it was a bargain. That being said, this isn't that bad when you consider that I think they are gearing it to business. What would five copies of XP Pro cost? Exactly. Hell, I'm a sysadmin, and I hate to say it but 90% of the workstations my end users use are running 98 SE. With the exception of a couple 2000 boxes, fourteen new ThinkPads running XP, one XP desktop, and my desktop that is running RedHat 9. I need, despera

  • Seems expensive, but remember.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by phisheadrew ( 526202 ) <`moc.rr.icnic' `ta' `werdaehsihp'> on Monday June 09, 2003 @10:09PM (#6157956)
    Everybody is screaming about the price, but its actually not that bad. Obviously SuSE isn't expecting people to go out and buy this instead of their regular linux for the home.

    If you wanted to install Windows XP Pro and Office XP on five computers, you can bet its going to cost you a whole lot more than 600 dollars.

    All thats left is to see if it works well enough to be worth the money.. I'd say for a business looking for stability and an identical setup on multiple computers, this is perfect.

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday June 09, 2003 @10:14PM (#6157988)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • This plus CrossOver Office might just work... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mrmeval ( 662166 ) <jcmeval@@@yahoo...com> on Monday June 09, 2003 @11:07PM (#6158249) Journal
    For at least some of a companies machines, this is very welcome.

    CrossOver Office needs to fix some things as the author states, the screen shot of the menu looks plain stupid.

    Yea, I need Exchange and it's not there, hope that gets fixed. I've had problems with kmail and authentication schemes as well.

    I'd prefer if only ONE browser was presented, preferably mozilla and that anything calling ANY DAMN THING on the web used that one browser. Different browsers confuse some (most) windows users and can be just enough to cause them not to choose the entire OS. Hell even keyboard shortcuts can do that.

    Is it MadPengs page that forces a jump back to top of page when you press the back button?

    If I could find the time, I'd do a CrossOver Distro (hey crossover SELL THIS! And fix the menus!).
  • For that price phone support should be included. You just dont get the same results when emailing back and forth...
    • For that price phone support should be included. You just dont get the same results when emailing back and forth...

      I always tell my friends to email me when they have network problems. ;-)

    • However -- would you really want phone support if it meant you had to talk to someone in German? with email, they can run it though the computer equivalent of babelfish (Sytran). Their comprehension and some of their answers indicate that the xlation SW isn't that perfected yet...

      But I agree...this is especially a pain when Germany is in another friggin' day for the most part. I'm in California -- and even the UK is 7-8 hours ahead of me -- meaning that unless I can manage to get out of bed *and* _be_

  • Volume licensing is cheaper (Score:3, Informative)

    by nniillss ( 577580 ) on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @05:28AM (#6159395)
    According to this (German) article [heise.de], volume licensing at a discount is available. I would assume 50 Euro per seat. Note that SuSE generally offers university discounts of about 30 percent.

  • cool, but (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tacocat ( 527354 ) <`tallison1' `at' `twmi.rr.com'> on Tuesday June 10, 2003 @09:33AM (#6160680)

    I think that this is great and I'm all for someone coming up with better desktop options. Who cares about the price, after all this is for companies and if enough of them can migrate, then other software providers will take notice

    But I have one problem/question with this progress that has been made under Linux of late.

    I have a series of machines that range from 600-750MHz and 128MB - 768MB RAM. It seems to me that the new KDE has become remarkably slow. To the point where I am unable to seriously consider using it on the lower RAM machines.

    Rather than just bitch and be labeled a troll, I have a serious question. Is this the cost of progress? I am assuming that WinXP is going to be equally difficult to use on these machines, but I have nothing to base that one. Has anyone tried it?

    Does the relative bloat of KDE compare to the relative bloat of other Desktop Environments?

    This is a real concern for me because the slow down in performance when comparing Suse is significant enough that I'm wondering if KDE is approaching Gnome in speed or if KDE has passed WinXP in performance (or lack thereof).

    I think that the responsiveness of a system is more critical that the Eye Candy it provides, especially as a User Environment. And I'm not seeing that in KDE. Are you?

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