Re: Linux Flavor: Mandrake or Suse?
From: Kevin Nathan (knathan_at_project54.com)
Date: 02/17/04
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Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2004 20:20:54 -0700
On Mon, 16 Feb 2004 14:20:58 GMT
"Jeff Lloyd" <jbl85@hotmail.com> wrote:
> a general feeling for each
> of the personal workstation offerings from Suse and Mandrake.
I use SUSE 8.2 at home and Mandrake 9.2 at work. I started out with
Red Hat 4.2 in late 1997 and most of their releases up through 7.2.
At the same time, I was multi-booting other distros but didn't like
any as well as Red Hat; plus, there were practically *no* books for
anything *but* Red Hat.
I was going to try Mandrake until we had a local InstallFest where
they were using Mandrake (7.something, I believe) and had it screw
up a couple of people's Windows partition, so I decided to wait. I
was getting impatient with Red Hat because there was some software
packages I wanted to try, but I needed newer versions than they
handled and figured I'd have to start compiling my own RPMs for it
when i ran across a copy of SUSE 7.0 at a local store and it contained
all of the packages I wanted, so I bought it.
Initially, I did a *lot* of swearing at SUSE -- it was quite different
from RH and I had to spend more time finding where things were, or how
they were done differently. After a few weeks, I stopped fighting it
and started looking at what they were trying to do and it became much
easier. After deciding to ignore most of my RH 'learned responses' and
finally sitting down with the SUSE book, I started enjoying it more.
I got up to SUSE 7.3 by the time the boss decided to go with Mandrake
for our conversion. He had to drag me, kicking and screaming, into the
Mandrake world. I was back to the 'everything's different' again, but
after a few weeks of this, I decided I would do like I did with SUSE
and try to live in the Mandrake paradigm at work and SUSE at home.
I've been Windows-free at home for about four years and I'm finally
Windows-free at work (for about three months, now). While I don't
like Mandrake as much as SUSE, it's still so much better than Windows!
With that background, here are my impressions (very subjective, not to
be confused in any way with any kind of empirical basis), and keeping
in mind that I am *not* a computer user, I view computers as a way to
challenge me -- getting actual work done on them is just a nice side
benefit:
SUSE is a little more polished and a little more complete, if you buy
the boxed Pro or Upgrade versions. If it's not on the CDs, it's much
harder to find a pre-built RPM.
Mandrake has better resources if the program you want is *not* on the
CDs.
SUSE is quite a bit easier to admin if you're a GUI fanatic and break
out in hives at the thought of a command line interface. YaST is well
organized and maturing at a rapid rate. The more complex programs are
still lagging, but each release gets better.
Mandrake's GUI admin tools are getting there. Still a little rough
around the edges, but getting there. The advance from 9.0 to 9.2 is
showing they are taking this seriously.
In SUSE, If you're stuck at a cli (runlevel 3) and you want to
configure the sound card, you run yast; if you want to configure the
network card(s), you run yast; if you want to work with the disk
partitions, you run yast.
In Mandrake, if you're stuck at a cli and you want to configure the
sound card, is it AudioDrake? SoundDrake? soundDrak? Or for a network
card, is it HardDrake? HardDrak? harddrak? Or for disk partitions, is
it DiskDrak? diskDrake? diskdrak? Do any of these run in a command
line version? IMO, this is where Mandrake needs to do some serious
work especially for the newbie crowd.
In SUSE, when you install a program from the CD it just works -- at
least in the vast majority of cases. I've only encountered one that
I had trouble with and I believe it's because I had installed a
tarball version a few weeks before of the same program but different
version number.
In Mandrake, when you install a program from the CD it's much more
likely you'll have to do some 'fixing'. It seems like SUSE does more
or at least, better, testing upfront. On the other hand, compiling a
Mandrake tarball tends to have fewer 'bumps' than SUSE. I believe both
of these differences will fade away as both distros move more and more
towards LSB compliance.
There are many other areas to compare/contrast, but in the end it's
still a personal preference. I like editting text config files, so
either one poses no barriers to me, other than familiarity. For a
newbie, however, I feel SUSE is the better experience. Especially if
you stay with the boxed sets, and use the printed docs. Mandrake is
not far behind, though, so the decision will be based more on your
impressions rather than anything we say here.
I'm getting along better with Mandrake at work, but miss some of the
handy little tools I've gotten use to with SUSE. At this point, I'd
have to say it's because I'm more familiar with SUSE and I may change
my views in another six months! But in the meantime, I'm starting to
play with LFS and looking at Gentoo, debian and FreeBSD . . . :-)
-- Kevin Nathan (Montana, USA) Open standards. Open source. Open minds. The command line is the front line. Linux 2.4.20-4GB-athlon 7:19pm up 22 days 22:39, 5 users, load average: 0.11, 0.06, 0.08
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