Novell should ditch Suse name [LWN.net]

Novell should ditch Suse name

Posted Mar 11, 2005 4:50 UTC (Fri) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559)
Parent article: SUSE Linux Professional 9.3 coming

Seriously, most North American customers don't even know how to pronounce it. Novell should digest the best of what the old Suse inc has to offer and then just call it something like Novell Linux. Given the relative weakness of many recent Suse releases this won't be a big loss in any case, and I suspect the hardcore hacker community in Europe that once proudly touted Suse as a homegrown success have moved on to the community distros (Debian,Gentoo,Ubuntu,etc). In short, the Suse name is commercially dead and the individual in charge of branding at Novell should just put it out of its misery. If Novell wants to seriously challenge Red Hat (they aren't so far), it can't afford to float any detritus from acquisitions that doesn't provide a useful future investment.

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Novell should ditch Suse name

Posted Mar 11, 2005 8:43 UTC (Fri) by freddyh (subscriber, #21133) [Link]

I cannot speak for the US, but here SuSE still seems to have a very good name. I see it being used by quite a number of customers (all for products, none for desktop). They all are very pleased with the stability and the way it works out of the box.

I have been using SuSE since 7.2, a few of my colleagues since 5.1. We seem to agree that 9.1 was a bit a pity, but all other versions we have used in between (including 9.2) seemed perfectly stable.

I guess it all depends on what hardware you are using ;)

Yours,
FreddyH

Novell should ditch Suse name

Posted Mar 19, 2005 0:09 UTC (Sat) by Sergio1704 (guest, #19452) [Link]

It seems that the US customers are keen to use the name Novell (I knew somebody who used it even before the takeover was finalized), but it wouldn't seem that European users want to ditch the name "SUSE"