Interview: SuSE's desktop designed to woo Windows users

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 6 Oct 2003 at 12:34

SuSE's Chris Schläger, Director of Distribution Development, and Marketing Director Jasmin Ul-Haque, tell us why the company has great hopes for the new SuSE Linux Desktop 9.0 operating system to woo consumers away from Microsoft.

CS
SuSE Linux Desktop 9.0 is the typical SuSE Linux product that we have had for almost ten years now. It's targeted at the home user and SoHo market, but it's not the Enterprise Server. It certainly features similar code bases, so the look and feel is kind of the same but it is a very different product.

It is a lot cheaper, and it targets a totally different audience. This is the mass market product. It is the Swiss army knife of Linux - it can do a lot, but it's not specialised for any specific purpose. It has a two-year life-span during which we will keep your system safe and up to date. After that period you're on your own unless someone in the community volunteers to carry on the product.

But then you can renew the licence, right?

JU
Ultimately you can buy a new product. When you consider the professional version costs £60, that's a very low cost for an operating system that's much more than just an operating system as it includes all those other applications.

CS
We have a product cycle of every six months, so it should be the greatest and best available software collection out there at the point when we decide to freeze the code base.

We have a lot of customers out there that consider Linux like a game. They want to buy it and play around with it for three or for months to find out all the new stuff that's in there, configure it their way and score their points by getting themselves more experienced with Linux, which is good - I mean that is also one of our target audiences.

So you're targeting people who have had a computer for a couple of years - probably a Windows one - who now think: 'well I know computers now, let's have a look at Linux'?

CS
Yes, they are the sort of person we expect to be looking at Linux, but we expect them to convert anyhow.

With Windows you have certain barriers that you hit if you dig into the operating system and want to find out how things work. And sooner or later you will hit certain barriers that you cannot overcome.

Because, in the end you would need source code to figure out certain things, and this is simply not available.

So there is certainly an audience that wants to find out more, and really understand everything that's going on. It's a small audience but it's there. But these would be natural converts anyhow.

But with SuSE Linux Desktop 9.0 do you have a more mainstream audience in mind too?

CS
With SuSE Linux 9.0 we also expect another group of Linux users to convert: the real audience that we want to target here are those who for some reason are really fed up with Microsoft - either because of the security problems they have and will continue to have, or the licensing scheme [Microsoft is] now applying.

These are probably the groups that are most willing to try something new. They feel the pain. They are afraid of surrendering their data to the random Internet community, because of viruses, backdoors and the diallers that are now around.

[With Windows] it's easy to get this so-called dialler downloaded which does nothing but dial this premium number, because you are connected to the Internet over IDSN or a modem, and you get charged for dialling, but you don't get any benefit from it. It's just a rip off scheme, but it's very popular in Germany and some other countries.