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Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) is perhaps best known as the distro that made a patent-protection deal with Microsoft. From that moment on, Novell was essentially dead to those that prize the free software aspects of Linux.
Given SLED's $120 price tag, even home users not concerned about SLED's ideological stance will likely not be interested, especially when Ubuntu, Fedora and dozens of other Linux distros are free (in this instance, we mean free as in beer).
That's okay though; neither free software enthusiasts nor home users are really Novell's target audience.
SLED is designed for businesses. Much of Novell's development efforts on SLED are geared toward making Linux play well with Windows. For businesses that need those features and also need to support Novell offers, the SLED distribution makes a compelling option.
The enterprise version of SUSE should not be confused with openSUSE, the free, open, community-supported version which has no direct connection to Novell.
So what do you get for your deal with the devil?
Well, SLED 11 brings all <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/18/open_suse_11_review/">the updates found in openSUSE 11.1</a> and also includes a number of Novell-developed features like the AppArmor security tool, and some proprietary apps you won't find in your typical open source Linux distro, such as Adobe's Acrobat Reader.
You'll also find support for Mono, which allows some .NET applications to run on SLED. Home users might not have much use for .NET, but given that it's a popular choice for many businesses' internal applications, ensuring that those apps can run in SLED is a big part of Novell's integration strategy.
But SLED's main selling point for businesses is that it can be quickly and easily integrated into their existing Windows networks. True, with a bit of tinkering and manual configuration you can get other distros to connect to Windows networks and play nice with app, print or file servers, but SLED just works.
Installing SLED 11 is a snap, just insert the DVD, select your preferred setup and click install. Once you've said yes to a slew of propreitary licensing agreements (Flash, Java, Agfa fonts and more), the whole process takes less than half an hour. We opted to install the default Gnome 2.24, but you can also install KDE 4.1 if Gnome is not to your liking.
Also worth noting -- SLED 11 is now using the ext3 filesystem rather than the ReiserFS as in the past. For those that love the ReiserFS, it will still be supported, you'll just have to set it up yourself before installing.
Once the installation is finished you'll be greeted by a very Windows-like arrangement of Gnome, with the main panel, and even start button, down at the bottom of the window. As with openSUSE 11, the focus is on making the Gnome environment match the Windows experience. The results will be familiar enough for Windows users to pick up on, but shouldn't leave Linux fans feeling lost.
The one place we found SLED's setup to be a bit confusing was the system admin tools. There are no less than three panels you'll need to dig through to make any customizations to your system -- the Control Center, Application Browser and the YaST2 setup panel. Those unfamiliar with SLED's setup will have a hard time figuring out which options are in which panel.
The rest of our experience with SLED matched that of other Linux distros but with slight Novell tweaks -- apps like OpenOffice 3.0 and the Evolution Mail client have been customized to work better with Microsoft tools like the OOXML format for OpenOffice, and Exchange Servers in Evolution.
Again, you could do the tweaking and adding yourself, but the idea is that Novell saves you the trouble. For the home user that isn't much trouble to save; for a business administrator with 1500 workstations to keep track of, well, you can see the selling point.
And for the most part the "interoperability" that Novell likes to boast about, did indeed work. We were able to connect to an Exchange Server and retrieve mail without any issues. Opening, saving and working with OOXML files also presented no real problems, though in one case when we moved the documents back to Microsoft Office 2007 there were some mangled characters and other formatting flaws.
Performance-wise SLED is on par with other distros using the 2.6.27 Linux kernel and Gnome 2.24. You'll miss out on some of the newer features in Gnome 2.26, but you can always upgrade yourself. On the KDE side it's disappointing to see the rather lackluster 4.1 version is the default, especially given that 4.2 is a huge stability improvement.
The bottom line is that SLED is indeed an enterprise-worthy desktop Linux distro and has the extras that might convince those businesses still sitting on the fence when it comes to Linux that it's worth trying.
We definitely do not recommend SLED to the casual home user, and of course the free software purists won't even read far enough to see this warning to steer clear of Novell's SLED 11.
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