Introduction

When we last heard from John Halamka it was October 2006, and the CareGroup CIO had wrapped up a three-month trial of four different operating systems. That summer, Halamka had embarked on a quest to find a viable alternative to the Microsoft desktop—fed up as he was with Windows’ instability. In July, he used nothing but a MacBook running OS X for work. The next month, he spent 31 frustrating days troubleshooting Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Fedora. In September, he returned to his Windows XP machine to compare it side by side with the others. Our scientific CIO concluded after his three month tour that his ideal computing machine would be a Dell D420 subnotebook running OS X. Given that such a machine doesn’t yet exist out of the box, Halamka reluctantly returned to using regular Windows at work simply because his newly beloved MacBook ran too hot and was too heavy to lug everywhere the jet-set CIO needs to go (though he did continue to use it at home).

CIO.com documented Halamka’s OS tests—what he liked, disliked and his conclusions—in Windows vs. Linux vs. OS X. The story struck a nerve with many readers. Halamka says the biggest criticism he received came from the legions of Linux loyalists who tisk-tisked him for trying only two varieties of Linux—and the least consumer-friendly distributions at that. They suggested he try SUSE (pronounced SOO-za or SOO-sa) and Ubuntu. So he did. Keep reading to find out what Halamka thinks of Novell’s SUSE Enterprise Linux Desktop (SLED), and stay tuned in July for his take on Ubuntu.

Novell SUSE Linux: A consumer-friendly version of Linux that’s “good enough. >>