Review: United Linux 1.0

Moderately uniform

United Linux' promise of a "global and uniform Linux" is essentially achieved by delivering SuSE for everybody. As the United Linux consortium already has admitted (MP3, 11 MByte) when launching the UL Open Beta in september, the participation of Conectiva, SCO and Turbolinux is basically limited to details: Turbolinux does "the internationalization for Asia" and Conectiva works on "GNOME and some kernel issues, especially high availibility features". SCO even completely dispensed its developer team to SuSE.

Most of the benefits envisioned for a uniform United Linux distribution surely can be realized by the "SuSE for everybody" concept. The industry for example gets the advantage of a much simplified and streamlined hardware and software certification for one instead of four products. Indirectly also the customer benefits from such a model. Additionally, he gets worldwide support, training and consulting of a piece.

Therefore it seems to be a mystery why each of the four United Linux suppliers obviously works on his own account in delivering the system management tools for the distribution. That simply doesn't make sense for a product that claims as one of its main advantages that the customer gets a uniform operating system for his worldwide subsidiaries.