Re: Suse vs Mandrake. I'm thinking of jumping ship.

From: Gonzalo (nomail_at_nomail.com)
Date: 08/29/04 

Date: Sun, 29 Aug 2004 01:46:25 -0400

Preston Crawford wrote:

>> Sean
>
> Good luck. My 2 cents, FWIW. I've tried both as well. I have the benefit
> of owning VMWare 4.5, so I've tried virtually everything. And I can say
> without reservation that SuSE is still the best. This garbage with OOo and
> some of the instability issues are frustrating. Especially considering
> SuSE USED to be better than this. So I definitely see where you could get
> frustrated. However, Mandrake is a horror to update, in my opinion.

How so?

Urpmi is the most mature installation and update tool of the existing tools
in the rpm based distributions. You obviously must not know not how to use
it.

And look, I actually have taken a liking to both Suse and Mandrake. I
initially got into Suse because it was on a server that I inherited. After
some initial grumbling on my part, I actually began to enjoy using it for
the most part. After that, I installed it on my laptop where I now
dual-boot MDK 10 and Suse 9.1.

There are things each distribution does better than the other.

Mandrake 10 is considerably faster all around than Suse 9.1 on the same
hardware. No contest. Suse is still quite useable, nonetheless.

Software installation is easier under Mandrake as is multimedia. Of course,
it can be made to work on both and I have. It isn't even terribly difficult
after some googling, but Mandrake makes it really, really easy.

Suse, on the other hand, looks better out of the box and beats the pants out
of Mandrake when it comes to setting up networking parameters through Yast.
It works better and more reliably in Suse.

It works in Mandrake as well, but if you move among a bunch of networks,
Suse makes this a bit easier, although I hear that Mandrake has a tool
called drakroam that will debut in MDK 10.1, so that should be interesting
to watch.

In summary, both distributions are very good, but each has distinct
advantages. They are also the only two distributions I will recommend to
new users.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Linux
    ... Mandrake and SuSE are generally considered the easiest to install. ... Some Linux versions require ... But after installation, there's not much difference. ...
    (alt.linux)
  • Re: chk drive for errors?
    ... SuSE 6.1 was the first I tried. ... Debian and a version of Mandrake, although I don't know which one. ... installation I wasn't keen upon. ... packages that Mandrake claimed were bad. ...
    (alt.os.linux.suse)
  • Re: TellyGuide - Free UK TV on your PDA
    ... > Mandrake or SuSe aren't any less significant than Redhat. ... Ahem - RH has around a 50% market share in Linux distributions by servers ... Mandrake, SuSe et al don't come anywhere close. ...
    (microsoft.public.pocketpc)
  • Re: Dual boot problem
    ... I never did figure out for sure whether> the Mandrake install was confusing the Suse> boot loader, but I found an interesting thing> when booting into Mandrake: The boot would work> OK, and Mandrake was fine, but if I then browsed> to the Suse install partition, the ambiguous double> root mounts disoriented Mandrake. ... directory that is already the mount point for a device. ...
    (comp.os.linux.misc)
  • Re: [SLE] dual boot system: partition table problem, XP does not boot anymore
    ... > XP and Mandrake 10 on it, and both systems booted and ran well. ... because i did not expect the SuSE installation routine ... Recovery Console, ...
    (SuSE)