Two pieces of news on Desktop Linux surprised me today.

The first is that the OpenSUSE team decided to drop ZENworks from the distribution. The issues with OpenSUSE package management are pretty well known. In fact, I blogged that I was reverting to the native tools last week. In addition, Novell decided to open up YAST and Libzypp, and release it under GPLv2.

This is wonderful news, however, I believe that Novell missed the opportunity to spin up Zen as a value-added package in SLES and SLED. The quote accompanying the article is really terrible, even if it is true.

A typical comment came from Ted Bullock, an openSUSE developer, who said, “This is very good news. I have never felt comfortable with the overall reliability and integration of ZENworks in openSUSE. I’m glad to see the last of it.”

The second piece of news that caught me by surprise is the rumor that Dell will offer Ubuntu on their desktops. It is still speculation, but if they do offer Linux on the desktop, it is a win for open source in general

Updated: My not-so-secret sources seem to confirm that it is true. D-day indeed.