On 24 March 2015 at 18:06, Yasha Karant <[email protected]> wrote: > I fully realise that this is a SL list (along with the occasional mention > of RHEL, CentOS, etc.). I currently am using X86-64 SL 7 on my > workstation. Our primary research compute engine is using X86-64 SL 6 with > MPI and Nvidia CUDA. A colleague here refuses to allow the migration from > SL 6 to SL 7 despite my success in migrating my workstation (with Mate as I > personally dislike both Gnome 3 and KDE Plasma having now had to use > both). Because my laptop is over 5 years old, I acquired a new HP ZBook 15 > mobile workstation, provisioned to support a 64 bit X86-64 OS. I was > planning to install SL 7, but now need to decide between that and OpenSUSE > 13.2 or possibly, if can we afford the licensing fee, SLES 12 or SLED 12. > I have looked at the OpenSUSE listserve more or less equivalent to this > one, and find fewer professional threads and discussions, although it does > seem considerably better than what I recall a student showed me from Ubuntu > (Debian derivative). I am not asking for any postings back to this list; > however, is there anyone with SL experience who also has OpenSUSE or SLES > experience? Advice would be most appreciated. I am going to be installing > OpenSUSE 13.2 on the new laptop, but backing off to SL 7 if it proves > unsatisfactory. I particularly am interested in OpenSUSE in production > university or research entity environments -- not enthusiast home use to > replace, say, MS Windows or even Mac OS X. > > Yasha Karant >
In many cases OpenSUSE is going to be a lot like Fedora or non LTS Ubuntu. It has shorter support times in comparison to SLED but gets updates to various core materials much sooner. It uses RPM technology but was for the longest time was more like slackware in how things were packaged up and laid out on disks. Usage of OpenSUSE in univerisity and research environments occurs mainly in Europe with various places in the US using it (though the US universities tend towards Debian.) YAST can be a wonder but it was getting a rewrite and people who liked it in the past have been grumpy lately. However that is most likely a temporary problem. -- Stephen J Smoogen.
