OpenSUSE 10.1, Novell's attempt to keep a general-purpose version of its Linux freely available to the open source community, is both aided by and suffers from the lack of attention from Novell.

In our tests of OpenSUSE, we found several items that made this version feel more like a set of experiments rather than a coherent project with which the public should try to work seriously. For example, Xen, new server virtualization software, was especially frustrating to use, and AppArmor, a tool that's supposed to help lock down applications running on the OpenSUSE machine, was more like a puzzle than a working security application.

OpenSUSE in most ways is to Novell as Fedora Core is to RedHat. Both are community versions of their commercial cousins. Ostensibly, these versions receive contributions as hand-me-downs from the commercial releases and aren't supported by the shipping vendor except via community IRCs and forums. So far, these community versions are similar to the commercial versions, though Novell says there are commercial version-specific improvements to the kernel, device drivers and other components. We did find that the kernel for the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) performed slightly better in our performance tests.