A few days ago we mentioned a small rant about SLED (shown above). It came from the media, so it was noteworthy. The following new blog item voices other concerns about the OpenSUSE Live CD.

anyways, I tried out the opensuse livecd (vesion 1.0.61) last night, and it was… odd. I was too tired to poke around much - I just wanted to have a backup run overnight - so I only really noticed negative things. sorry.

The goal here is to show that SUSE is not at the forefront of GNU/Linux development. In many ways, it seems to have lost its lead. SUSE was probably the best GNU/Linux distribution out there before the deal with Microsoft. Jermey Allison sort of confirmed this in our interview with him. I was a SUSE user myself before the deal. I was a SUSE faithful for years, but Novell's post-Messman management took a wild ride.

This is not just a matter of diplomacy and law (software patents), but also a question of technical direction. As we point out regularly (even days ago), Novell's Mono is entering other GNU/Linux distribution and this raises serious issues, especially with respect to long-term impact.

The following is not exactly news, but among the development milestones mentioned in the latest KDE digest you have this:

Mono (C#) KDE bindings reach a usable state.

The KDE team is hopefully not planning to integrate Mono with the desktop environment's core. Be aware that Novell is still working on KDE, so it's part of its agenda. What's more, the new leader of the OpenSUSE project is a long-time KDE developer.

It's worth keeping an eye open, especially knowing Jody Goldberg's involvement with ECMA (for improved OOXML documentation). He is a former Novell employee (departed months ago), much like Miguel de Icaza who preaches about the greatness of OOXML while wearing a Novell VP hat in Microsoft conferences. ⬆