[vox] SuSE Price Disappointment

[Jonathan Stickel]

Rod Roark wrote:
> On Monday 11 October 2004 11:37 am, Robert G. Scofield wrote:
> 
>>I notice that SuSE 9.2 Professional will be out in November for $89.95.  
>>I am disappointed that there is no advertisement for a 9.2 Personal 
>>Edition for $29.95.  In the past there's always been the less expensiver 
>>version.  I don't know if SuSE will release a cheaper version later.  I 
>>don't know what their practice is.  But I'm wondering if there's been a 
>>change as a result of a big business like Novell taking SuSE over.
> 
> 
> I don't see much sense in paying for a Linux distribution
> for personal use, especially with the inevitable upgrade
> treadmill.  There are so many excellent free ones out
> there... Slackware, Debian, Gentoo and others.  Once you
> have one set up, everything is pretty much the same.
> 
> Companies like SuSE and Red Hat have shareholders who demand
> maximum profit.  Which is fine for them, but it's the kind
> of business model which creates the problems that led to the
> popularity of Free Software in the first place.
> 
> Linux works best when you take advantage of its freedom.
> 

This is pretty much my sentiment as well.  I started with Linux using 
RedHat (7.3-9).  I was very disappointed when I learned there would be 
no RedHat 10; instead there was the completely non-free RedHat 
Enterprise Linux.  After understanding RedHat's corporate nature and its 
motives, I switched to Gentoo and have been very satisfied.

You shouldn't pay for Linux; it is free.  However, you may /choose/ to 
pay for service.  That is supposedly what you get with RedHat 
Enterprise, Mandrake, or SuSE.  Some of that is visible with their 
installation and other gui tool programs.  Eventually, these will show 
up in the totally free distributions, but for now I can see why these 
might be worth money to new users.

With this in mind, I really recommend Fedora for novice Linux users.  It 
has the ease of installation and gui tools of RedHat, yet it is totally 
free and has quite a bit of user community support.  At Installfests I 
install Fedora 80% of the time.

Jonathan