I was reading on cnet that Lenovo and Novell are planning to offer Suse on ThinkPad. This move made me believe Suse is still holding up in the tough OS market.

I was once one of the first adopters of Linux Suse on the desktop. At that time Suse was the leader of the Linux desktop by providing an easy to use eye candy desktop environment. Suse used KDE as its default desktop system while RedHat (it’s biggest competitor) used Gnome.

I was the only one of my friends to adopt Suse over RedHat or Mandrake. For me Suse desktop was superior. Suse developers tried to pay attention to details and to make things look nice yet functional. Unfortunately Linux early adopters were hackers and system administrators who wanted Linux to be difficult and exclusive so obviously Suse wasn’t their first choice.

Things have changed a lot; hackers and power OS users now appreciate the clean look of their desktops. The biggest example is the rise of mac systems sales. However, this is didn’t help Suse achieve better place in the desktop market because Ubuntu – the new Linux super star – was born and it was rapidly becoming the most popular Linux distro.

Ubuntu’s biggest advantage over Suse is the fact that Ubuntu is based on Debian. So you are getting the most stable Linux distro, the most successful packaging system (Debian package) and a very nice looking and easy to use desktop.

IBM has always been helping Suse to gain leads in the OS market by investing money in Novell (the current Suse owner) and by supporting Suse on IBM’s hardware and software products. But IBM also has been helping Ubuntu supporting IBM software; in fact, Ubuntu is already certified to run DB2.

As Ubuntu keeps rising in the desktop and expanding in the enterprise, Suse seems to have internal problems. And the people who once started Suse are no longer part of Novell!

Web2.0 has taken the news headlines from operating systems. Yeah the media always gets excited about new things. But web2.0 has a lot to offer, now you can use AJAX, Rails, PHP, etc. to build web applications that can do almost everything desktop applications can do. In addition, you get access to these application from anywhere with internet connection. You no longer need to be concerned about OS support, data backup or software upgrade.

Talking about OS war these days is like talking about the cold war. It’s part of the past�