Redhat vs Suse vs Mandrake
Added Note:
We recently tested and have settled on Debian for
many reasons (see Linux
for details). Also see RPM-2-apt/dpkg
After being disappointed with Redhat's mangling of the KDE
desk-top, I
decided to try out mandrake and suse. My background is mostly Redhat 6
-9 with
shell experience on BSD and a Debian derivative firewall. As I had
looked and
not found much information besides the usual “My distro is
better than yours
is” type posting so now that I've finished I thought I would
share some of the
differences I found. I put both distros on the same ASUS AMD
motherboard.
Suse 8.2
There is no free download other than the demo and the set came with a
DVD rom
which I tried and failed to install from. You can cnt-alt-Fx to get at
different
processes running for the install and I could see the error. Calling
Suse
did not exactly provide what I would call great support. I
did find that
others on use-net groups had similar problems and went on to install
with the
set of regular Cdroms.
The install was not much different than RedHat –
there did seem to be more
options of what to install. Things are not where they would be on a
RedHat
system and while that could be a good thing, I did not see any
advantage to
Suse's placement and often found myself puzzled as to how where to
look. I could
understand someone placing all the GUI commands under a separate tree,
but if
there was a grand logic to where things went it escaped me.
After installing I ran the YaST and after quite a long time
everything was
updated. The Sound worked with out problems. Setting up the networking
(we use
DHCP with DDNS) was not a problem.
Suse has obviously done quite a bit of work trying to make
M$win like gadgets
for configuring things. The attempt is commendable, but the results
didn't
always get things working. Setting up a HP5000 network printer went
well. After
getting things set up I tried to copy a large directory off the server
(using
NFS) and Suse would hang up and I would cnt-alt-F2 and back to
cnt-alt-F7 and
after an eon or two things finally transferred over. The system
continued to act
unstable and I could find nothing interesting in the log files
– which seemed
to have been filtered and absent of information?
Suse is using reiserfs for the file system and that could be
a possible
explanation to the problems? I'm not digging into the problem as the
idea was to
save the time of setting up the source forge kde-redhat package and
that is not
what is happening here.
Something about Suse give the feel of a M$ box where the user
is no longer in
control. I spent 30 min trying to find where the cron job
that I saw
listed in the log was, but I didn't find it even using “grep
-R”. Suse
seemed to want everyone to do everything the Suse way with out any easy
opt-outs. There was no choice to start in a text login screen in Suse
and I
didn't find where to set it to a shell login anywhere – (I'm
sure there is a
way – but it is not upfront). It feels way too much
like a M$ box to
make me comfortable.
I had my daughter try and use it and after it crashed while
writing with
OpenOffice a couple of times, she wouldn't use it anymore.
Mandrake 9.1
I had no problems with the install and finished installing
and did the reboot.
For some reason, the reboot displays in a box so that less lines are
visible.
This may look cute, but it requires more things to be up and working to
just see
an error (not that there was one.)
Once running the updating went fine except that it took a
while. The setup tools
that Mandrake has are MUCH better than Redhat overall. Installing the
hp printer
was even easier than Suse and setting up NFS was a snap. I
did find it
annoying that the standard shell has smooth scrolling so that
“cat
/var/log/messages “ can take forever (I'm sure there must be
a way of turning
that off, but I didn't take time to find it).
Overall Mandrake was just about what I was looking for. My
son started using it
and liked it until it started crashing. Every time he would type
anything in
Mozilla it would freeze. I took the slash and burn tactic of removing
his
Mozilla folder and letting it rebuild a new one, but the problem was
back the
next day. It is easy to recreate – just create a mozilla
icon, set some page
as the default home page and next time it starts try to enter text in
the
address bar and everything freezes.
As running Mozilla as a browser and setting a default home
page are not things
that are out of the main stream this probably isn't a good sign, yet
overall I
like Mandrake well enough that I'm going to put the new release on and
see if
the problem continues. (I bought a Mandrake membership mostly to keep
the
competition alive in the Linux distributions and hopefully to give me
an out if
RedHat damages KDE even further over time.
I have put Redhat 9 on a box for my daughter and she likes it
and it is stable
as a desktop machine. I put the kde-rehat deal on it from sourceforge
and kde is
livable.
I was surprised that Suse was so disappointing after all the
hype about people
adopting it. The learning curve of moving to Suse from RedHat is
steeper than
that of going to Mandrake so this might taint my observations. Both
system
displayed instabilities on the first day of usage of very run of the
mill
things.
Debian
Debian is now our choice distribution. See RPM-2-apt/dpkg
for those of you moving on from RedHat. I like debian for
several reasons.
First, debian is the most Linux "community" oriented in that
it really
is where the other distributions get their parts. Security fixes always
seem to
be available for debian before even Redhat and I believe that redhat
basically
just grabs the patches from the debian distribution as they have their
fixes out
always a few hours after the debian fix.
Debian follows the much more rational and standard locations
for file placement
which means more scripts/programs will work with out having to fix file
paths.
There are three versions of Debian at anyone time Unstable,
Testing and stable.
The "stable" version of Debian is ultra stable - but for desktops lots
of people use testing as it has a more recent Kernel and would be
similar in
stability to redhat9 (verses the older enterprise products they are
pushing now)
Debian needs only to be installed once, after that all
upgrades are via and
update program called "apt-get". There is no charge for apt-get.
Apt-get also seems to have the best handle on dependency problems.
I like it better than Redhat. An example helps - I needed to
install e3 (a
tiny text editor I've grown used to) and all I did to make this happen
was to:
wajig install e3"
and it is finished! No searching, No dependency problems.
<g>
I've also noticed that for some reason debian includes exim,
slypheed and other
gpl packages that I would have to go get with redhat/mandrake/Suse.
I have also noticed that a large portion of developers use
debian as their
platform so problems with specific applications should occur less often.
Debian has more than 8,710 software packages included with it
at this time.
Debian is also where the heart of the Linux community is -
they include no
software that has even questionable licenses - that means that you
won't get
hooked on some program that will cost money or have propriety file
formats to
keep you from your files later in life. This may not seem like a big
deal, but
it is. (I have gotten married to some CAD software where the support to
keep it
working with OS upgrades now costs $1,500/year).
The down side of debian is that the install software is a bit
rough ( they are
porting anaconda (redhat's install software). I had problems with the
standard
install because of a CD-Rom drive. So I went and bought Libranet
(Libranet is
debian). Libranet seems quite nice and of course all one has to do is
set up
apt-get afterwords to get (and keep up to date) what ever version of
Debian and
installed packages. (Apt-Get allows full control of which software
(unstable-testing-stable) to update from.) Remember you only need to
install
debian once!
Unlike the RPM GUI package managers in RedHat (that frustrated
rather than
helped - I just used the command line) the synaptic manager is worth
using
although I've learned to use wajig for remotely updating packages on
servers.
A couple of notes on KDE/vs Gnome
I've run both desktops and it really gets down to the file browser.
From the
user's experience not much else is different. The KDE file browser is
just
better – it takes a bit of learning, but it is clearly better
than the M$ file
browser which I can't say about the Gnome. I also have no plans to run
evolution
as it is a move away from integrating the best available to
interoperate;
instead it aims to make a proprietary suite. The competition of
individual
packages is what give Linux such great potential. Bundling is bad for
users in
the end for the choice and thus the marketplace of ideas goes away.
More competition in Linux than in the M$ software
world
One very strange fact of the Linux vs M$ OS's is that while
Linux is painted as
a communist OS, the fact is 180 degrees from that. M$ OS depends on the
US
federal government buying systems that work on proprietary file
formats. If Our
government only insisted on all default file types to be open
standards, the M$
monopoly would disappear in just a few years. So in the commercial
world there
is no competition while in the Linux word there is very much
competition and the
resulting innovation.
The innovation is powered by the pride of writing good
software and then showing
all ones code - no programmer wants the public to see sloppy
code. Some
people complain of the forks and think that KDE vs Gnome is a waste - I
don't I
think it is what will lead Linux to be the best that there is.
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