A distribution bytes the dust!

[jullrich at euclidian.com (Johannes Ullrich)]

> It may come across as flame bait

Ok. I am taking the bait ;-)

As far as Suse is concerned:

I did try it seriously this spring as 8.2 came out (I bought the
boxed version and installed it). The reason I dropped it for RedHat 9
is mostly that I am an old time RedHat user. My gripes with Suse:

- Its KDE centric, not Gnome (like RedHat). At the time, Ximian
  had no "Ximian Desktop" for Suse 8.2
- Tools I like (Evolution, Mozilla) didn't work as well as they did
  with RedHat. Again a result of the KDE influence I assume.

> 1) You can't get the latest version for free.  If you want the latest
> greatest version, you must pay for it?

SuSe, unlike RedHat, does not offer free ISO images. However, all the
packages are downloadable, and I think there are instruction about 
how to go about installing from scratch using the ftp site.

> 2) Updates are not free.  

Updates within the version are free. For updates to the next version,
see my first comment: While you will not get free ISOs, you will be
able to upgrade via ftp package by package.

> 3) Init scripts are BSD style rather than SysV.

rather a matter of preference :-/

> 4) Package management is lacking and the tool (yast, IIRC?) most used
> for pm is a little cryptic.

I actually like 'yast'. It may even be a tad better then the 'up2date'
tool. Yast is more in line with 'Red Carpet' (Ximian "packet manager")

However, unlike Debian, its not as easy to compile everything from
source. Unless you got the 'srpm' rebuild process down, which I find
is not harder/much different then doing it the Debian/BSD way.

Overall, my main issue with Suse is (a) KDE centric, which is a matter
of preferences, and (b) as a more technical issue I find that Suse
includes too many packages that do not interoperate well. While 
RedHat includes less packages, I find them to be more solid then the
Suse packages.


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Johannes Ullrich                     jullrich at euclidian.com
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