On Mon, May 07, 2001 at 04:49:27PM -0400, Frank Rocco wrote:
Hello,
I'm a newbie and just purchased SuSe 7.1 I was wondering if some experienced users could comment on the difference between SuSe and Redhat. Which one is better in terms of support and operation?
OK, since I'm running SuSE 7.1 on two computers and Redhat 7.1 on another, I think I can answer this in terms of operation. Since I've never called on the official support of either company, I can't answer in terms of support. Full disclosure: I prefer SuSE for various reasons, including internationalization support (which, admittedly, RH is catching up on) and the style of system administration. I run Redhat on my laptop because I need at least one RH distro sitting around for work purposes, and I incidentally appreciate the kernel 2.4 without having to compile it. The RH 7.1 install is, I must say, the best one RedHat has so far come out with. It was pretty close to SuSE-level in ease of use and auto-configuration. The package selection, though, is much smaller. Also, Redhat has a tendency to configure things (wrongly) for you without warning you or telling you where to change them. If you have a dual-boot system, you have to go tweak lilo.conf by hand to get back to Windows. I also ran into trouble with the wireless card I use; RH had silently put non-standard default options into /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts that I had to hunt down and change to get my card to work. The advantage of RH right now is its (presumable; I haven't called upon it) support for the 2.4 kernel. This is nice on my laptop; I tried to compile kernel 2.4.3 myself and got into a situation where I could use either my kernel-supported PCMCIA cards or my non-kernel-supported ones, but not both at the same time. In day-to-day operation, Redhat by default supports the Gnome desktop environment, whereas SuSE has gone with KDE by default (though they both provide the software for each desktop.) Since I don't use either, this doesn't matter to me, but it might to you. Also, I haven't found within Redhat any console system administration tool approaching YaST. (I dislike graphical sysadmin tools, mainly because I find it bothersome to have X and root at the same time.) Those are all the differences I've noted to date (I've only been running RH7.1 for a week. :) I hope that gives you some info. -tara