Filipe Joel de Almeida wrote:
Right now I'm trying to choose between Red Hat and Suse. One of my friends (who is a Red Hat fan) told me that he didn't like SUSE because we were a bit dependant on their configuration tools (I think he mentioned YAST).
Can you please tell me if SUSE would be the best distro for me to start with, and why?
I used Red Hat for 2 years, then I took the job I have now, for a company that sells SuSE (among other things). I was very happy with Red Hat, the first thing I started talking after I was hired was that we should also sell Red Hat. Then I installed SuSE to check it out. Never touched Red Hat again ever since. And I'm not saying that Red Hat is bad. It isn't. SuSE will do more stuff automatically for you than Red Hat will. You are not really dependant on YaST, but what if you were, is that such a Bad Thing (tm)? YaST makes it easy for you to configure stuff that you'd have otherwise to know how to configure yourself. YaST does not "hide the Linux" from you; the Linux is there for you to look at (/etc/sysconfig/), but what if you particularly don't really want to, or don't have time right now to do it? Also YaST will reduce the changes of a newbie messing the system up. SuSE has a lot more software in the kit that Red Hat does. And, most importantly it's all so nicely integrated. All I can say is that you'd appreciate SuSE even more if you used Red Hat for a length of time, then switch to SuSE. An example: Installation of mailman (with postfix). With SuSE, you just install the rpm then activate the service and you're good to go. I don't know what's the status of Red Hat now, and I think I'm not beeing fair not comparing to their latest distro, but when I installed Mailman on Red Hat (6.2 or 7.0, don't remember), it was a pain. First, install postfix instead of sendmail. Then Mailman, then configure apache for Mailman interface, then bang head against wall because of mailman.mail-group or user does not work right etc. The result is that I know very well how Mailman works. This wouldn't have been the case with SuSE, I would have stayed ignorant in this respect. It depends what the purpose is: learn how Mailman works or actually do stuff with Mailman? If you want to learn how stuff in Linux work, you'd better install Debian, Slackware, or the Holy System: Linux from Scratch. Compile and install everything from source, on your own, that is. (I'd like to do that someday)