Errr
What exactly do you mean with "Freiestoffgesellschaft" ? Is it a reference to "free stuff" ?
It seems natural enough that SUSE Linux and SAP would be technical allies; both hail from Germany and both try to peddle business-grade software to enterprises. SAP, which has a huge installed base of Windows customers and a considerable number of Unix customers, cannot be seen to be playing favorites with its OS suppliers just …
You asked for it ;) http://www.answers.com/topic/blinkenlights
ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS!
Alles touristen und non-technischen looken peepers!
Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben.
Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen und poppencorken
mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen.
Das rubbernecken sichtseeren keepen das cotten-pickenen hans in das
pockets muss; relaxen und watchen das blinkenlichten
SuSE Linux/Novell have recently been trying to demolish the Linux image of robustness and high software quality. This happened during the timeframe they snuggled up to Microsoft, which might or might not be a coincidence.
Anyway, I am German and I use Ubuntu. The SuSE 11 and 12 experience of some acquaintances were more than enough for me. I did use SuSE 6 (think) more than ten years ago and it was OK then.
Thanks for moving your eyeballs here.
Germany is more than SuSE in terms of open source. Think of
GPG - initially funded by the German ministry of the interior
OpenOffice - initially Staroffice and developed in Hamburg
KDE - at least initially a German-heavy project
Schilix - an Open Solaris distribution
openSUSE has (quite rightly) taken a bit of a beating and I think they recognise that and are moving to correct it. I decided to try fedora-17 and ran screaming from it as a desktop system. It wasn't just gnome, KDE worked for a while and then refused to run and kde configuration apps.
Most businesses however are going to run servers and don't care that the sound system needs a tweak to avoid some hiss or that 1600x1200 is the maximum resolution until you install nvidia drivers. What they will care about is the awful iscsi packaging failure in 12.x, though I suspect that's an openSUSE rather than SLES issue. Most of the recent bells and whistles that have proven unstable probably aren't going to appear on your server.
I've tried ubuntu and fedora recently and I still find yast the best configuration system around. You may still have to edit the occasional file, but at least you don't have the "you need a random gui program to configure this with a gui" problem that most distros seem to have. It is nearly all tied together nicely. As you would expect from a German distro, its is all very well organised. :D
CLI people can also benefit in that config files tend not to end up all over the place as seems to happen with ubuntu. That may be just me though.