Quoting Steven T. Hatton on Sun, Feb 25, 2001 at 05:21:57PM -0500:

On Sunday 25 February 2001 15:12, Togan Muftuoglu wrote:

...

Hi everyone,

As I was reading the Howto's I have always wondered why it is mostly that they are talking about Redhat. Now that I am interested in the Linux router project it became Debian ?

Can someone lighten me up with information on why it is either Redhat or Debian but not Suse. there has to be something else then marketing and the $ since AFAIK debian is pure GNU Togan,

I wonder if the same is true of documentation which originates in German. WRT $, there may be someting of a polarity showing itself here. To much of corporate America Linux means RH Linux. It's the CocaCola syndrome - name recognition. The fact that many software vendors and even consortia tend to say their product 'runs on R**H** Linux', rather than 'runs on LSB compliant linux' doesn't help. On the other side of the $ question are the purists who think that RH has sold out to corprate America. These people therefore see Debian as the *only true Linux.* My hope is that SuSE can continue to improve their quality control to the point where bying SuSE means it works right out of the box. If companies see that their IT pros can work more efficiently and effectively with SuSE, they will have a reason to favor SuSE to RH.

The same is true of the home user. If the configuration is easier, and the hardware support is better, people will chose SuSE. I cannnot honestly draw comparrisons. I have only used SuSE. It would be nice to have enough resources to install several different OSs and run comparrisons to see which actually does work the best. Every time I get a clean hard drive I install SuSE, then I start configuring it to do things. When I think I should try Solaris x86, for example, I realize I would have to dissrupt the SuSE box where I would install it. That never happens.

I did install Solaris x86 on a cean HD the other day, and It has some nice features. I then tried to find bits for the KDE and didn't see any. Well, the box now has SuSE on it, and it's running quite well. I almost installed RH over the net, but when I looked at how they do it, I decided it was too much of a hassle.

Steve

I have traveled a bit with the distributions both at work and home. I still use debian at home for my firewall and mail and other stuff; but I have a new system that I would like to use. I also use one of the boxes as a wireless gateway with the orinoco cards. I got debian potato running on it at a level I wanted in 20 minutes. Another 45 to compile a kernel and pcmcia services on it and its been up for almost 70 days. My firewall box had been up for almost 156 days but then we had a blackout here in the East Bay. I think that all the distributions offer something to people one way or another and in my work environment, I seem to see most of the distros. I have had some less than positive feelings about redhat in the past and I remember this discussion we had on the suse list a few years back where even Donnie Barnes was in there discussing stuff. My feeling then was redhat has a red hat and red means stop. SuSE has a green whatchamacallit :) and green means go. Go with SuSE. I have been using SuSE since 5.0 and have hung out on this list from time to time since then. SuSE 5.0 was fun. I remember some of the scripts for the english version were quite interesting to figure out. But through all that we had the mailing list. I also read along with debian, caldera, and redhat's main lists from time to time. I have a lot of respect for debian overall. I like their approach and their courage. I also really like apt-get and the whole mentality behind it. But, happy to say, that SuSE seems to be the one I come back to. It has that certain richness of tapestry that others don't. We kid a lot at work that when SuSE 8 comes out, you will need to carry around a 50cd case to hold the thing in :). I respect it though, and I respect the people that make it and manage it. -- Michael Perry mperry@tsoft.com ------------------