So I’ve been fiddling around a bit more with Suse Studio, checking it out and pondering various things. While I think it’s a fairly nice idea and has a lot of merits when it comes to quickly and easily creating custom Linux appliances I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s far from revolutionary – and a bit overhyped.
Pros with it is it’s ease of use. It takes literally minutes (not including build-time) to create and appliance, and it’s all done with a peck-and-shoot interface. Everything is simple, and anyone with basic experience in computers will be able to build an appliance provided they understand what they’re doing. The interface is slick and polished and overall works efficiently.
Yet I feel that this is nothing new. Debian for example can do virtually the same thing when booted from a network-enabled CD. You can choose the role of the computer and choose packages to suit it. The difference is that Suse Studio does it in a “cloud computing” environment, and that you can save your builds for later download while the Debian way is much more direct and requires more interaction.
I’m also annoyed at the lack of documentation. When you steer clear of the templates you have to essentially choose individual packages from the package manager, and as is the case with every package-management system they tend to have rather cryptic names and sometimes even more cryptic descriptions and dependencies. This is however not unique to Suse Studio – Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, et al suffer the same problem. It’s the drawback of having thousands of packages and applications at your fingertips. Great power comes with great responsibility, and so forth.
But it also serves to highlight that the only difference between Suse Studio and most other ready-made distributions is that Suses approach is to put this process on the web.
So is it revolutionary, and does it deserve the hype? Not in my opinion. But it is kinda nice anyway, and will probably fill some niche somewhere. But I believe most people will find that Suse Studio is reduntant modularity for an operating system that’s already far more modular than any proprietary system.