Linux desktop odyssey: don't stress, Linux is productive too

Rodney Gedda

Rodney Gedda is the former deputy editor of CIO and former editor of Techworld.

Last week I copped a bit of flak over my “when Linux has a bad day” blog, which highlighted all the problems I was having trying to just get on with my work. For the purists who think I was misguided by labelling Linux, well Linux, I wasn't. I was merely reporting my own experience with the SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) release 10.

SLED runs a Linux kernel, an open source software stack, and is marketed and commercially supported as a Linux distribution by Novell. So like it or not, how well it performs will affect the reputation of both Novell and the whole “Linux” user experience, the same way Red Hat products can influence the reputation of Linux and Red Hat.

If anything Novell has done more to improve the user experience on SLED than other organizations (commercial or community) have done for their own Linux distributions.

Enough said?

Having narrowed down my biggest bugbears, I can give some positive feedback for everyone considering using SLED and Lotus Notes in the workplace.

Notes is a performance hog. With only 512MB of memory in the machine I'm inclined to think that is the pain point, so I'll see if I can upgrade that to 1GB soon. For now, if you are going to run the Lotus Notes client for Linux don't even think about skimping on the hardware.

Novell's client software for Linux is not reliable. The Linux version of the Novell Client is not as predictable as its Windows counterpart. We had it working fine and then, puff, it stopped dead in its tracks. Don't know if it's a configuration issue or what, but Novell might want to get this sorted ASAP if its Linux desktop is going to be pushing out Windows clients anytime soon. Novell's Client software personifies all reasons to hate proprietary software at the protocol level.

Other than that things have been good.

I've had at least two full days of productivity with SLED, but due to the resource demands of Notes, I've reverted back to Windows until I can get more memory for the computer (and a non-broken Novell Client would be most welcome too).

All the usual apps – Web browsing, document editing, and file browsing – are a snap.

I have no doubt an “enterprise” supported distribution of Linux like SLED 10 can be just as, if not more, productive than the popular XP and Vista releases of Windows.