This may be slightly off-topic for this forum, but I wanted to hear what the Suse experts have to say. We are are a research non-profit with about 2500 staff (300-400 part time Unix users and 100 hardcore Linux users) and about 500 openSUSE and some SLES and CentOS boxes ( 50 Desktops, 100 servers and a compute cluster with 350 boxes) Our goal has always been to create a unified environment which enables researchers to use their NFS mounted home directory from everywhere and most of our systems are at openSUSE 11.2 or 11.3. In general we really like Suse and have only 3 gripes: SLES is too different from openSUSE (only small number of packages) KDE support for encrypted wifi is insufficient (Gnome is only slighly better) package names change too frequently (but I don't know that any other Linux distro is doing a better job here) I wanted to add that the infrastructure IT people i our organization moved to CentOS after they found the package manager to be unworkable in 10.1. (We found it pretty hard to swallow, too ....but we kept going with Suse) We are now starting to re-design our HPC cluster and one of the questions that came up is which Linux distro we should use in the future. We also need to upgrade our desktop Linux desktops so this seems to be a good time to take a deep breath and re-think what we are doing. We only considered openSUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora and CentOS. We quickly ditched CentOS for being always being too outdated and Fedora for being too bleeding edge. This leaves us with Ubuntu and openSUSE. after a few days of research our group came up with this list and we are still working on it. Please correct Advantage openSUSE --------------------------------- * YaST administration tool centralizes and simplifies configuration and administration. * As a team, we have much more experience supporting openSUSE. We have deployment tools, software repositories, and rescue tools for openSUSE and have experience building rpm packages (e.g. using the openSUSE build service) * Would have no migration costs to different Linux OS (~$50k - $100k for migration of 100+ Linux Systems to Ubuntu) * 8-month release cycle indicates openSUSE focuses more on stability * Single edition of openSUSE supports both servers and desktops, KDE and Gnome. (KDE in openSUSE is better supported than kubuntu) * openSUSE is a Tier 1 distribution that can get bugfixes faster upstream to the kernel developers (Ubuntu reports bugs to Debian which reports them to the Linux kernel developers) Advantage Ubuntu -------------------------- * About 3x more binary packages are available for Ubuntu, including scientific applications. * Ubuntu is hardware-certified for more Laptops we use. (Gnome and Unity have better support for ‘encrypted wifi’) * Enterprise "Long Term Support" (LTS) version is actually the standard disto with longer support cycles and is free (gets maintenance updates for 3 years on the desktop version and 5 years on the server version / Suse SLES subscription $350/year) * 6-month release cycle indicates that Ubuntu focuses more on keeping software up-to-date. * Ubuntu has a larger user community worldwide which is able to produce more documentation * better supported in cloud environments (EC2 AMIs, etc) * better supported with configuration management tools like puppet or chef. Obviously some of the advantages are highly tailored to our organization. I would be interested to hear what other advantages we might find regarding openSUSE. For example, is there interest in more active support of high performance computing technology in the future (nfs/rdma, HPC distro using OSS schedulers etc) Thanks much for your input. dipe -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org