Good post. Before we decided on using RedHat so widely in-house, my staff and I did a LFS build. We have people here using Mandrake, SuSe, Debian, Peanut (a minimal distro if there ever was one!) and freeBSD (not Linux exactly). We decided as a team that 1) all software would be from source, 2) we would not use a package manager, and 3) we decided together what functionality we needed for the users we serve and then we chose what we thought the *best* software would be for us and use only that software. It was a great learning experience, but we won't do it again. Why? Because we discovered that all of the software, including sources, we chose (with 2 exceptions) was available to us on RedHat. Will we deploy RedHat on the desktop, yet. To a small number of "power" users, yes; but generally, we won't...yet. From our perspective (and *ONLY* our perspective) RedHat is the closest we have come from cutting ourselves off from Micro$oft on the desktop. If RedHat can continue to stay open source and continue moving towards providing a superlative desktop experience for users who *hate* change, then we will shift our resources to RedHat. Having said that, I hope that SuSe, Mandrake and/or the Unified Linux Group give RedHat a real run for their money. Nothing will help RedHat more than knowing that someone else out there is aiming to do it better, faster and with fewer resources. >>> pboy@barkhof.uni-bremen.de Sunday, November 24, 2002 8:16:35 AM >>> Am Sam, 2002-11-23 um 20.14 schrieb Joe Klemmer: > On Sat, 2002-11-23 at 11:34, Anthony Abby wrote: > > > > > I'm off shopping for Mandrake 9.0 tommorrow. > > > > > > Good luck. You might want to look at SuSE as well. > > > > I switched to Mandrake 9 about a month ago and have been nothing but > > happy. It's great! > > FWLIW, I have found that if you use any of the major distros you really > won't go wrong. I'm tired of the distro wars but can't resist to comment here. :-) I'm also tired if the "new harmony" aka "all distros are the good". There are a lot of differences between them. You won't go wrong but nevertheless you can make a "sub optimal" decision. e.g. SuSE: they "re-configured" the KDE menue, too, implementing their SuSE menue (not as a distro specific addition but as a replacement) and it is hard to get rid of it. Or if you su to root, you can't start a KDE or Gnome program anymore (e.g. kate to edit a configuration file, you have to use vi or a special console menue, deeply hidden in the menue tree). The menue system is quite cluttered and you need many klicks to start a program. There are a lot inconveniences in details which sum up into a remarkable loss of usability (as a desktop). And "United Linux" at least in the current version is nothing else than a SuSE 8.1 with less end user applications. e.g. Mandrake I don't use the current version 9 but did with versions 6-8. There are a lot of bugs in the distro. E.g. ISDN support (relevant for european users) - they can't get it working seamlessly for several releases. May be because of so many bugs they disabled the bug report facility for their users (you have not only to register as with Redhat or SuSE, but you have to apply and qualify as a bug reporter in order to get access - even during the beta period for beta testers). A very smart decision in order to achive a mostly bug free distro. Their online update facility offered a kernel update (qualified as security fix) for months (!) that resulted in a non-bootable system. O.K. you won't go completely wrong, but could get a more or less suitable distro for your working habits and requirements. Currently you won't get "the optimal" distro either, you have to decide which of the features hurts you less and which of the many bugs is acceptable or doesn't matter in your environment. Someone may switch to Mandrake or SuSE to avoid some features of RH (e.g. blue curve) but as a payoff he/she has to accept some other "features" which he/she will not know about yet (but might be more uncomfortable as the "features" of e.g. RH he/she knows about). The proof of the pudding is in the eating. And according to my findings, RH is not "the optimal" distro but the "least hurting" one (in terms of severe bugs and usability annoyances) Peter -- Psyche-list mailing list Psyche-list@redhat.com https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/psyche-list -- Psyche-list mailing list Psyche-list@redhat.com https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/psyche-list
