[plug] To SUSE or not to SUSE?

[Rennie]

On Wed, 14 Apr 2004 08:35 pm, Russ Powers wrote:
>  --- Matthew Prouse <mousematt at webace.com.au> wrote:
> >Does anyone run SUSE 9.0 here? Will you be upgrading?
>
> IMHO...
>
> I've used suse for years. Can't say there's anything wrong with it. I still
> have suse 9.0 on my laptop because debian/libranet can't seem to handle my
> pcmcia network card correctly (very old and has always been difficult). But
> since suse was sold I now install debian/LN on all my other machines. I
> found that suse is great as long as you do things the suse way. And for a
> non-technical user desktop, IMHO, that's great.

I'm using suse 9.0 and would have to agree with Russ about the suse way of 
doing things, eg the YaST setup tool is quite nice, well integrated and 
functional but I never did get around to figuring out how to install software 
from a source not on the suse list.

The Mandrake equivalent/s  IMHO are not as nicely polished and a bit buggy and 
clunky in comparison.
>
> But using LN now I've found there's no comparison to the amount of help and
> just general information out there for the debian distrobution. And apt-get
> is a wonder after years of rpm's.  :)

suse doesn't seem to have anything like apt as opposed to Mandrake which has 
the excellent urpmi. Also I've noticed there is a lot less binary packages 
available specifically for suse.

I like to see the bleeding edge stuff so have Mandrake Cooker installed on the 
home laptop and use urpmi to make the almost daily upgrades to the latest 
releases.

I hope this gives you some more food for thought. I'm looking forward to suse 
9.1 but I don't know if it will change anything much or whether I'm just 
hooked or upgrading.

For stable and polished I'd probably pick suse, for latest and largest range 
of apps...Mandrake.

Cheers

Rennie