I'm surprised you find SuSE and RedHat better tested than Mandrake. One of my biggest problems with SuSE (which I used for over two years as my preferred distro) is that they have a closed beta program. Perhaps they haver very strict testing, but as long as it doesn't get real world testing, you have a lot more chance of shipping major bugs. Off the top of my head, I can think of the problem in SuSE 6.4 that made Netscape crash on startup on most installs, the auto detection of sound cards that it didn't support (which it then attempted to install), not to mention the fact that SuSE's upgrade tool regularly nukes partitions for everyone's enjoyment.
There are two major problems I see that cause this - (1) the closed beta process, which unlike Mandrake the users have absolutely no say about how the new release is coming untill release. (2) The MS-style Shared Source(TM) license of YaST/YaST2 which prevents most contributions to fix/improve the installer except by SuSE employees (unless they are willing to give up all rights to their improvements). Frankly, RedHat isn't much better - they've always been willing to ship buggy things, like RH 7 (IIRC) which included a horrible copy of GCC, or just in RedHat 7.2, I had to launch the RedHat Network tool three seperate times to get it to work (it kept crashing at various stages of initial update setup). Mandrake certainly isn't perfect, but I think their style of testing - which is much like Debian's - is definately the best method out there. They may not listen to users *all* the time, but they certainly do it a lot more than SuSE does. -Tim -- ---------------------------------------------------------------- Timothy R. Butler [EMAIL PROTECTED] Universal Networks http://www.uninet.info Christian Portal and Search Tool: http://www.faithtree.com Open Source Migration Guide: http://www.ofb.biz ============= "Christian Web Services Since 1996" ==============
