I don't know if anyone will care about this, but I have to get it off my chest. I guess I'm really hoping that there are people within SuSE who will read this and take note, and take heart. I'm not looking to start a flamefest here; I just want to talk about my experiences. For several years, I've been a perfectly-content Red Hat user. All of this changed with their recent product reorganization. For those unfamiliar, their "consumer" product is now little better than a rolling beta, and they will only patch it for a year. The minimum you can spend to get their "enterprise" (read: stable) workstation product is $180 PER YEAR, PER MACHINE, but that fee gets you access to 5 years of updates. Yes, you _could_ use their enterprise product (it is still, after all, GPL software) -- if you can get hold of the binary disks (how you would install from the source rpm's, I have no idea) -- but you would still only get source rpm updates, and that whole business gets complicated fast. Bottom line? I don't want to upgrade every year, the quality went to pot, and I don't have the money to buy their server product at $300 per year on my 3 servers at home. So I went shopping. I bought SuSE 8.2 Pro Update, sight unseen. I installed it on my 2 workstations, and liked it immediately. But I was still concerned about whether SuSE would "pull a Red Hat" down the road, and leave me hanging again, so I decided to try Debian. I installed Debian on my file and print server and my firewall. Based on this success, and my desire to run whatever distro I use on both my workstations and my servers, I put it on both workstations as well. I'll spare you the details. Most of the software averages 1 to 2 years old, and none of it is integrated to work with anything else. I can see this as an advantage from one point of view. In fact, I honestly see the entire Debian policy as a really great set of ideas. However, it's been my experience that these ideals don't work well in practice. Understand: I fully recognize that Debian is loved by many people (though many less than any of SuSE, Red Hat, or Mandrake, if any of the polls I've seen show), and it certainly will work for a different set of circumstances. As long as your hardware and your requirements are two years old, you're golden with Debian. Otherwise, if Debian doesn't get kicked into high gear, they will obsolete themselves within a year (except for people who need to run Linux on non-x86 platforms, to whom a 2-year-old distro is the only choice). And I don't care how many rabid fan boys say that apt is the greatest gift given among men, it's more cumbersome to use than RPM. Sure, ok, you can do a seamless distribution upgrade. I'll grant that I don't do that. Never have. Probably because version upgrades on every platform I've worked on suck. From an anal-retentive point of view, I'm unlikely to think that even a Debian version upgrade would be cruft-free, but I haven't actually tried it. The point is that, given Debian's extremely slow production cycle, the average Debian user has only had one upgrade, from potato to woody, at best! So for all the hassle of pinning and specifying mirrors and not being able to cache local copies of said mirrors unless you have about 12 GB of disk to throw at it, *and* not being able to _reasonably_ store even just the stable distro on the network, I could have paid for the time it would have taken to clean-install all of my 8 machines a couple times over. I actually had one Debian fan tell me that it was plainly obvious to the whole Linux community that Debian owned the server room, and would extend it's dominance to the desktop any time now. I don't know what planet he's living on, but I hope it's got beautiful sunsets. I work for a Fortune 250 company, and the only Linux distro's we're talking about are Red Hat and SuSE. To even be considered, whatever Linux we wind up using is going to have to be a support organization behind it, and it's going to have to have current software in it. So far, I haven't seen a single major software vendor (RDBMS or CAE) mention anything other than RH or SuSE for Linux platforms that they support. (Well... Oracle does talk about Caldera?!) And so I'm writing this note. I've now installed SuSE on my personal firewall, file and print server, and my email and web server in addition to my two main workstations. I'm only still more impressed with the distro. For the price of the Pro Update boxed set, I get an incredible value in the community. I get 5 CD's, two DVD's, and a good primer manual (and a sticker, but...). The only gripe I have with the distro is that I had to learn the Yast2 method of administration the hard way. And, by that, I mean that after I had gotten my email all configured the way I liked it, with procmail feeding spamd and all, I moved on to work on my web server config. Suddenly, my email stopped spooling. I had run Yast2 to install something, and SuSEconfig wiped out my postfix config. Took a while to get it all sorted, but after a couple hours, I now can admin my system with the help of Yast2. I can put my custom changes in place AND keep my config rolling forward with patched RPM's. This is a _really_ awesome feature of SuSE Linux over the other distro's I'm talking about here. Back to the gripe: there just needs to be an small explanation about this whole "paradigm" in the manual. Maybe it's there, and I missed it. Perhaps it's time for *all* distro's to have a "if you're moving here from another distro" section in their manuals to get experienced Linux people up to speed on the differences. I still don't fully understand how to customize SuSEfirewall2 yet, and so I'm still using my own scripts I brought over from Red Hat, but I'm sure I'll get it going the "SuSE way" soon. SuSE wins the ditro wars in my mind. Why? - $80 full install media kit. (Sure it's not $0, but it's not $120 either, and you can get a $45 option.) - TWO YEARS of updates. (If this changes, I think I'll scream. At least support 8.2 for two years, as that was the stated policy on the web site at the time of purchase.) - Current software. (KDE 3.1, Gnome 2.2, OpenOffice 1.0.1, Mozilla 1.2.1, etc.) - Stable and nearly bug free. (The *only* issue I've seen is that gkrellm2 has a problem with the lm_sensors config panel. I compiled gkrellm(1) from sources, which has the added benefit of keeping all the gtk-widget stuff I run at 1.2, instead of the garish 2.2 stuff.) - Best administration facility I've seen in ANY *nix. (AIX is the closest with smitty.) - I know this is a holy-war topic, but that's why I'm only posting this note to suse-linux-e and not debian-user and shrike-list (must... fight... temptation...): I *like* RPM. - Fantastic updating mechanism with a great gui AND a great curses interface. (It's very easy to setup a local mirror of the updates, and even to automate local updates to look at the local mirror. Not only that, but the system actually _handles_ the dependencies, instead of just complaining.) Whew! Open letter to SuSE: PLEASE DON'T CHANGE ANYTHING!!! I think you have an enormous opportunity to sweep past Red Hat right now, on both the desktop and the server side. Your prices are better, and much more straightforward. Your software is stable and fast. Your update system doesn't leave a bad taste of Microsoft-ish bait-and-switch tactics trying to raise revenue. I think you need to pour on the marketing in the States extolling the differences and advantages you have over the competition. Kindest regards to the SuSE team abroad! dk P.S. Mandrake wasn't in the running in my mind, what with their bankruptcy casting a pall on their long-term chances. Gentoo is nitty-gritty, and that would wear thin in a server farm situation. If SuSE copies what Red Hat has done, that's still a possibility, but I hate waiting on things to compile. Slackware may be the best mix of everything for me if that happens. I haven't checked them out since I started with Linux 8 years ago. -- David "Dunkirk" Krider, http://www.davidkrider.com Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being." Linux: Will you use the power for good... or for AWESOME?