Many people have asked us; Why Black Lab Professional Desktop? After all Red Hat and SUSE offer desktop systems with their enterprise offerings. What can we do with Black Lab Professional Desktop that they don't do? So we are going to answer those questions right now and hopefully give you, the customer, some insights into our practices vs theirs.
The Open Open Desktop
We call Black Lab Professional Desktop the Open Open desktop. So what does that mean? While SUSE and Red Hat love to talk about open source and they declare themselves the champion of open source thats not 100% accurate. Red Hat and SUSE have a policy that if you compile your own kernel, if you pull down your own version of GNOME or XFCE that you will lose your support contract and your subscription is null and void. We don't believe in that. We believe that it is your system and that if you need to compile your own code you should be able to without consequence. Our policy is that if you compile your own kernel, we will help you support that. If something breaks, we help you fix it. There are only two requirements to that. 1. You give us access to your changes and 2. That you use a stable kernel. The reason why we require a stable kernel is because development kernels have so much change and so many code differentials between releases we obviously cant keep up with them and by the time you fix those problems many times a fix is already submitted. Red Hat and SUSE only support one desktop..GNOME. Thats it. if you deviate from that once again, they cut your subscription and you are null and void. Null and void are two words we dont believe in here. If you want KDE, use it. If you want Mate, use it. If you want Cinnamon, use it. While we don't offer ISO's with those desktops we dont penalize you. While we offer ISO's with GNOME and XFCE we believe its your enterprise and you can use what you feel comfortable with. We believe in that so much that we have alternative desktops in the repository and if you want those as your default, order the custom configuration and we build it for you. We offer options and flexibility which are two options Red Hat and SUSE don't offer.
Price and Support
Lets face it, economic challenges are on the rise. With the BSA (The Software Alliance) running campaigns like, Bust your Boss and Play it Cybersafe, proprietary software makers are out to get you. You will never get fined or punished for using Black Lab Professional Desktop even if you don't have a support subscription. If anyone tries to punish you or fine you for using Black Lab Professional Desktop we will help you defend against such attacks. While Red Hat and SUSE have really expensive software license fee's ours are extremely reasonable. For the same price that Red Hat and SUSE charge you for 10 systems we have a corporate license which means you can install Black Lab Professional Desktop on as many machines as you like and as you need. We believe we need to earn your business not that you have to give it to us. While Red Hat and SUSE penalize you for not renewing your support subscription by cutting off important system and security updates we do not. Even if you do not renew your support subscription you will continue to get important security updates for Black Lab Professional Desktop. If you decide not to renew and a few months pass and you say "Hey I think we need a support subscription" while Red Hat and SUSE will charge you a separate fee for that and you will lose time because they start it over from when your original contract ended, we don't. The minute you pay the subscription costs you get a full year, from the date you renew to that date the next year. With Black Lab Software there is no pay in May and then pay again in January. We believe the support subscription is to help the customer not to be used to obligate the customer and not to be used as a leash to lock you into our services. With Red Hat and SUSE's support subscriptions, they only support their products. With Black Lab Software we realize that you have a mix of environments. You may use Ubuntu, you may use Linux Mint, you may use Kubuntu and you may use Windows. We even help you guys support systems that are not even our own.
Technologies and development
While Red Hat and SUSE offer workstation systems they are limited in what they can do. You have web browsing, e-mail and documents. Thats it. At Black Lab Software we realize there is much more to desktop computing than that. You want to watch videos, you want to do multimedia presentations and production, you want to video conference and some of you may want to do graphics and animation work. With Black Lab Professional Desktop you get it all. We have all multimedia codecs installed. We have full multimedia support. We have graphics manipulation programs, video production software as well as common desktop productivity applications. Developers, we have the Black Lab SDK included with every copy of Black Lab Professional Desktop. Red Hat and SUSE, you have to use their enterprise OS for application development. You cannot write UI code and graphical applications in Fedora or OpenSUSE and move it over to Red Hat Enterprise or SUSE Enterprise. Because Fedora and OpenSUSE are bleeding edge releases code changes. Black Lab Professional Desktop and Black Lab Linux Community Edition are both based on LTS technologies and share common code. We are also compatible with Ubuntu 14.04 and Linux Mint 17. Any applications you write on Black Lab Linux Consumer Edition, Ubuntu 14.04 or Linux Mint 17 will run on Black Lab Professional Desktop. With LSB support most apps you write on Red Hat enterprise or SUSE Enterprise will run on Black Lab Professional Desktop. Some of you may say, well Red Hat and SUSE have container support and XFS support. When you install the Black Lab SDK, included with every copy of Black Lab Professional Desktop, you have FULL container support. If you want to use XFS or BTRFS you can use those file-systems as well. Once again flexibility and options.
Application support
Red Hat and SUSE have a reputation for being able to support a wide range of Enterprise class applications. Black Lab Software and Black Lab Professional Desktop does as well. Oracle products, JBoss, IBM enterprise products and PeopleSoft are all fully supported on Black Lab Professional Desktop. With Ubuntu becoming the defacto standard of Linux distributions we support any and ALL applications written for Ubuntu. This includes many other enterprise and commercial packages.
So we believe we have a good base for Enterprise and professional desktop deployments. We offer options and flexibility not only in features but in support and pricing. We are here to earn your business and to work with you in your truly Open Enterprise environment. For more information on Black Lab Professional Desktop visit our Professional Desktop page. If you want to purchase Black Lab Professional Desktop you can Buy It Now.
