On Sun, 2 Jul 2000, Karl J. Runge wrote:
> Thanks for your report, I'm sure folks (myself included) find your
> notes useful.
>
> However, myself I am not much interested in how the installations go
> (after a bit of sweat one can get most stuff working, that's the Linux/Unix
> way), but rather how good are these distros wrt working with them (daily!)
> for many months.
Well, I have my actual desktop at home dualbooting to Mandrake 7.0 at
the moment, and it's been like that since I got the disks. I do like
DrakConf and KDE (which is found on just about every distro out
there...)
> I understand that is too much to ask: but if you could even speculate
> (not necessarily now) on the long-term maintanence, upgradability, ease
> of adding 3rd party programs, compatibility, etc, I'd find that very
> useful.
For upgradability, I give SuSE the highest ratings. Yast2 does a great
job at finding pagkages to upgrade. Mandrake is decent as well, but you
need to enter the setup/install program (I guess Yast2 is in this
category, too<g>) and choose 'upgrade' and ftp/http install. I haven't
had any other distros installed long enough to have to upgrade yet...
For maintenance, both Mandrake and SuSE are fairly easy and
straightforward. Yast2 does pretty much everything linuxconf does but
with less graphics yet a more intuitive text-based menu
interface. Mandrake's DrakConf is an X app, but it is also more
intuitive than linuxconf IMO. For installing/uninstalling software,
RPM's are beautiful things. I ether use the cli or kpackage in SuSE or
DrakRPM (I think that's what it's called) in Mandrake. Any one of these
is pretty easy to figure out. The only drawbacks are that SuSE's
directory structure is a bit different from RedHat (Mandrake is fully
compatable w/ RH), and that almost everything in third party software is
made basically for RedHat.
So, of the two distros I can comment on, it depends on what you are
looking for most:
For ease of general use: either one.
For third-party software compatability: Mandrake.
For ease of administration outside of X: SuSE.
For ease of administration with X: Mandrake.
For easy upgrades: SuSE.
> I sense myself wanting to get off of Redhat after using it for the past
> 3 years, perhaps going to Debian or back to Slack... it would be nice
> to hear of the longer-term gotchas of these relative to RH.
If you use RPM's, and you're used to RedHat, try Mandrake. It's very
similar and comes with a few extra toys. SuSE is a bit different, but
it's still Linux.
In the cases of both SuSE 6.1 and Mandrake 7.0, which I've used most,
there are still a couple translation bugs... You'll still see an
occasional German dialog or such in SuSE and a French one in
MAndrake... I've seen one in each. In SuSE it was in the default sax X
server test screen and in Mandrake it was some obscure error that I
never saw again.
Personally, I started running all my machines on SuSE, and liked it, but
really liked Mandrake after I got 7.0. (6.x sucked... which is how I got
SuSE in the first place...)
I hope this helps, even though it isn't nearly comprehensive.
Brian
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