Post by Mark FosterFor everyone else, thanks for the feedback... sounds like OpenSUSE is worth
trying.
I grabbed the LiveCD Images yesterday and wrote them to USB. They won't
boot :( I was hoping to get away with not burning an actual CD. Might have
to try to find a blank, though...
(I was able to get my Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Stick to boot fine, so there must
be something odd about the boot-from-USB instructions... When read from
Linux the sticks contain stuff, but are unreadable in Windows 7; by
comparison the Ubuntu stick is infact readable from Windows.)
Sounds like you've already made a decision, but here's my 2c worth:
SuSE Linux were amongst the first moving into desktop marketing. They
put out some v.good boxed sets which included the CD-ROMs and a set of
manuals to (give one the confidence to) get-going. Courtesy of my
professional contacts I was frequently nagged (sorry, 'evangelised')
into using Linux, and so SuSE was 'my first love' (in the Linux world).
The original SuSE guys (Germany) were quietly impressive and v.capable!
As others have suggested I found things a little slow, both wrt updates
and m/c utilisation. I used SuSE both in desktop and server modes and
apart from this had few complaints (related to the distro).
YAST is a GREAT tool. It goes beyond package handling and into
configuration management. As such if you stick within the more common
parameters it will do a lot of set-up work quickly and easily, all from
the comfort of its own GUI. As we all know, this sort of facility is
useful at the start, but can end-up getting somewhat in the way as one's
own knowledge advances and as complexity/demands increase...YMMV!
On the more idealistic front, others have written how SuSE was first
taken-over by Novell (which may have caused a 'slow-down' in and of
itself), and later went over to the dark side in making an alliance with
MSFT. To a degree, coming at 'that' time in my learning/experience, this
encouraged my thoughts to look around at other distros...
Others have detailed the differences in package installation mechanisms
between the Debian-based distros, eg Ubuntu, Mint... and the Red-Hat
hegemony. This choice can have more implications than might first meet
the eye!
The RH hegemony works like this:
1 Fedora is the bleeding edge distro. As with others you can hang-ten on
the bleeding edge or you can stick with the formal distros. The current
release is F15 which features Gnome3 (as a for-instance of edge-yness)
[I'm sticking with F14 for a while longer...] Formal releases are
published at ~six monthly intervals.
2 Red Hat is the commercial form of this Linux and the name of the
company. It benefits from the knowledge and experience gained from
Fedora and offers a more conservative?reliable distro, aiming at
commercial interests with full support and consultancy services. Red Hat
(the company) also offer niche and specific software and services beyond
the distro. Current release is RHEL6 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux).
3 CentOS and SL (Scientific Linux) were born out of a decision some
years ago to take Red Hat commercial - so those who have ideals causing
them to object to SuSE may have once found this 'retreat' from 'open' to
'paid' a little hard to swallow, also. These two 'downstream' distros,
as a generalisation, are 'free' versions of RHEL.
Another downstream version of RHEL is Oracle Linux - also known as
"unbreakable" at various times/guises. A spat developed between the two
'pay' providers, so with RHEL6 Red Hat added a few twists to their
update and support mechanisms, formally stated to prevent Oracle from
riding on their coat-tails for free - or more to the point, for
(Oracle's and unshared) profit.
Sadly this had a consequent impact on the two 'free' downstream
versions. For this and sundry sad internal reasons, it took the CentOS
(volunteers) six<nine months to release the latest CentOS 6.0. This
undoubtedly affected 'brand loyalty'...
CentOS then is a conservatively spec-ed distro, nominally geared to
servers and server rooms. Perversely (oh yes I am!) I have also found it
excellent for small machines and laptops. Traditionally CentOS has been
run from the cmdLN and through SSH. However it comes with Gnome
(default), KDE, and XFCE GUIs on-disk (and quite possibly others) as
well as a full range of both desktop and server software.
SL managed to come out with v6 somewhat sooner than CentOS. This
encouraged me to take a look. It is produced by the Fermi Lab, ie CERN,
iee the folk who brought us (Sir) Tim Berners-Lee, the world-wide web,
and the web browser. As such I expected, but failed to unduly notice, a
bias away from commercial-server and applications. They do concentrate
on clouds plus both BIG DATA and rapid data acquisition. So these guys
know how to put racks and racks of machines together!
I didn't make any leap, sticking with CentOS for servers (and RHEL when
clients can/will pay!) and a few years ago moving more to Fedora for
desktop and dev m/cs (more recent releases of applications and tools).
Debian is another powerful and influential distro. I do not champion it
or claim particular experience. It has also gone through cycles of
updates and delays, and just like the others wrestles with the
to-include or not-to-include questions; and has a stable and
cutting-edge differential to suit one's taste/ambition. Rightly or
wrongly I gained the impression that if one really doesn't want to
muck-about with an OpSys, but just wants to get-things-done, the
distro's philosophy is probably not a good fit...
With a tip of the hat to Mark Shuttleworth and the Ubuntu ppl, I think
that distro is well worthwhile for new converts (from both Win and Mac
worlds). It also suits home-users, who simply want to achieve 'work'
with the higher-level applications (or access their Internet/games with
minimum distraction...).
[having said that, I've dropped greenhorns onto both Fedora and CentOS
with no particular ill-effects - but the choice was largely to suit
their intentions to call upon me for support...]
Please don't assume from that quick observation that I'm talking it
down. Remember any distro can be configured to run as a desktop or a
server, and pretty much any combination of systems and applications s/w
can be made to work (sometimes 'out-of-the-box' and sometimes needing
heavy tools). My impression (again, right or wrong) is that there is
more mention of Ubuntu on New Zealand LUG-lists than any other distro.
Accordingly it would imply the availability of more community-support at
our finger-tips!
If you prefer to have a bit of support at your elbow, I have a similar
impression that there are more Ubuntu books at (my) local book stores,
than there are about other distros.
Contrarily, this situation may change now that Red Hat have opened a New
Zealand office...
I'm sufficiently agnostic and flexible to encourage the use of Linux
without fussing too much over choice of distro, GUI, language, etc.
I will recommend that if you are (likely to be) working with multiple
machines: 99.9% of the time you will add fewer wrinkles/stomach
ulcers/heart-attacks/nervous breakdowns/etc to your score-card if you
keep all your machines either as Debian-variants or all from the RPM/Red
Hat stream!
--
Regards,
=dn
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