Internet Niue wrote:

Hello Group,

Now that I have extensively tried both Mandrake 8.0 and SuSE 7.1 for the "Joe User" desktop environment, I though I would flip a quick email to the group to tell you all what I though.

This is comparing SuSE 7.1 Pro, to Mandrake 8.0 Powerpack. And this is all from the point of view of "Joe User" who we will consider to be a guy who just wants a desktop machine and wants to get some work done at the office.

Joe User is not a linux guru, he knows his IP address, he knows the difference between a hard drive and a floppy, and he understands the difference between root and normal user, and that's about it.

Machines are identical Pentium III 733's 10gig IDE hard drive, IDE CDROM, 256 Megs PC133 Memory, Intel 815 motherboard and chipsets. 3Com Network Cards, AGP S3 Virge Video Cards. On board Sound (Intel).

The mission is to install a desktop machine to run on a Windows/Linux existing network using KDE, Star Office, GnuCash, Standard Browsers and Kmail.

I think it's pretty unbiased, because I'm going into this not really caring one way or the other which flavor of Linux I use. But it's going to be the easiest one to set up, because I'm basically lazy and I want my machines to work for me....I refuse to work for them.

So from that point of view, here's how they stack up:

**Installation:

SuSE Excellent. Click and Go Mandrake Not Bad, but harder to figure out. Still pretty much click and go.

**SAMBA Printing to a Windows Network:

SuSE Worked right out of the box. Had to enter the IP address of the W2K Server, and a user name for the printer. It did the rest during installation.

Mandrake Was able to print a test page after four or five hours of fiddling, finally got it to print to the SAMBA machines, but then after reboot it wouldn't print at all. Finally got it to print to the W2K boxes by compiling a real version of Samba and setting my smb.conf files myself. Joe User wouldn't stand a chance.

**Star Office 5.2 Installation:

SuSE No problems. Click Click. Done.

Mandrake Could not get the Star Office to recognize any version of Java that I loaded in the machine including the java that comes with the Mandrake. I even compiled Sun's and still no go. I never was able to install Star Office with the java working.

**Network cards etc:

SuSE No Problems Mandrake No Problems

**Video Cards:

SuSE Found it and did it.

Mandrake Had to tell it how to find it and what it was, and spent three or four reboots trying to determine how to do that. Had to start the install over a couple times. Almost fried one monitor because even though I told it the exact model of Philips that I run, it configured it into an out of range frequency when it rebooted, and if not for the built in safety parameters on the monitor itself, I would have fried it. Scary.

**Sound Card:

SuSE Found it, had to activate it at installation time.

Mandrake Found it, it just worked.

**GnuCash 1.4:

SuSE No Problems

Mandrake No Problems.

**Browsers and Kmail: Nothing to mention. Both were easy.

**Apparent Speed (from the User's prospective):

SuSE Mandrake Couldn't tell any difference.

**Overall Packaging and product Presentation:

SuSE Excellent CD Holder, Cute little hat pin that my wife loves, a cool decal set, really nice installation, configuration and applications manuals.

Mandrake: Plastic covers on the CDs (they won't last long), no hat pin, the manuals are incomplete for any kind of "Joe User", a sheet of mandrake decals for the front of the computer. I wasn't impressed.

**Overall impression from a "Joe User" desktop point of view:

SuSE "I can get my work done with SuSE in under an hour of installation, and it will *work* for me".

Mandrake "I can use the CDs as a mirror when I comb my hair, because I'm not going to spend the rest of my life *working* for an operating system."

**Registration:

SuSE Via Web. Instant.

Mandrake Via Web-web site crashed when I was almost registered. I don't know if I'm registered or not.

**Conclusion:

In my opinion, SuSE 7.1 is *almost* a flavor of linux that I could mail to my mother and say "put this in your computer, mom, and email me when you get it done". It's almost there. It's certainly a desktop environment that a normal person could figure out and be working in an hour or two. Or at the very least, after a little help from someone.

Mandrake is not there yet.

Comments?

Will this be posted to the Mandrake forum? :-). Very interesting set of tests. But I must admit to a bias, I do not like Mandrake too much purely based on its looks, that purplish color I saw almost made me puke. And those Penguins too, they looked drugged out....But thats just me. One thing I hbate the most, when someone goes onto a forum and asks which distro he/she should get for a desktop all the Mandrake shrills come on saying Mandrake, whatever happened to people trying out different distro's until they find the one they like? Thanks for the tests, had a feeling it would be something like that. Notice the price difference between SuSE 7.2 Professional and Mandrake 8.0 Powerpack? And compare to what you get? Even on weight you can tell :-). Publishing this would probably create a bit of a storm IMHO... Matt

On Saturday 21 July 2001 05:24 pm, Internet Niue wrote:

Hello Group,

Now that I have extensively tried both Mandrake 8.0 and SuSE 7.1 for the "Joe User" desktop environment, I though I would flip a quick email to the group to tell you all what I though.

<snip>

**Conclusion:

In my opinion, SuSE 7.1 is *almost* a flavor of linux that I could mail to my mother and say "put this in your computer, mom, and email me when you get it done". It's almost there. It's certainly a desktop environment that a normal person could figure out and be working in an hour or two. Or at the very least, after a little help from someone.

Mandrake is not there yet.

Comments?

Here, here! I have been tracking Mandrake right along with SuSE since 6.0, but 8.0 is the last time I will succumb to the lure of its eye-candy and hype. Linuxconf, Drakconf and all the other *confs* don't hold a candle to Yast. I, too have spent hours and hours on Mandrake trying to get it to fly right, but in the end, no version of it has ever remained on any of my machines (even in VMware) for more than a day. Not only that, the Mandrake list is becoming inundated with ex-windows users (that's not all bad), but they don't seem to do much reading before asking for help......."My mouse flipped on its back.....what do I do?.....It *always* worked in Windows!" So, I am a devout SuSE user, as long as the value continues. My two cents. ;-) -- TRBishop tb64710@alltel.net SuSE 7.2 Pro

Very interesting. I could do this with SuSE 7.1 and Red Hat 7.0 if anyone cared. But it would be very brief because the only difference I had is Red Hat 7.0 detected my sound card, whereareas, SuSE didn't. On another Note, RH 7.0 came with Kdevelop, SuSE didn't. Im still using SuSE, but I have RH on another partition because I liked it just as much as SuSE and I use it for Kdevelop, the app I could never get working on my SuSE and still can't. -- David M. AIM: dmcglone27 ICQ: 96210352 On Saturday 21 July 2001 17:24, Internet Niue wrote:

Hello Group,

Now that I have extensively tried both Mandrake 8.0 and SuSE 7.1 for the "Joe User" desktop environment, I though I would flip a quick email to the group to tell you all what I though.

This is comparing SuSE 7.1 Pro, to Mandrake 8.0 Powerpack. And this is all from the point of view of "Joe User" who we will consider to be a guy who just wants a desktop machine and wants to get some work done at the office.

Joe User is not a linux guru, he knows his IP address, he knows the difference between a hard drive and a floppy, and he understands the difference between root and normal user, and that's about it.

Machines are identical Pentium III 733's 10gig IDE hard drive, IDE CDROM, 256 Megs PC133 Memory, Intel 815 motherboard and chipsets. 3Com Network Cards, AGP S3 Virge Video Cards. On board Sound (Intel).

The mission is to install a desktop machine to run on a Windows/Linux existing network using KDE, Star Office, GnuCash, Standard Browsers and Kmail.

I think it's pretty unbiased, because I'm going into this not really caring one way or the other which flavor of Linux I use. But it's going to be the easiest one to set up, because I'm basically lazy and I want my machines to work for me....I refuse to work for them.

So from that point of view, here's how they stack up:

**Installation:

SuSE Excellent. Click and Go Mandrake Not Bad, but harder to figure out. Still pretty much click and go.

**SAMBA Printing to a Windows Network:

SuSE Worked right out of the box. Had to enter the IP address of the W2K Server, and a user name for the printer. It did the rest during installation.

Mandrake Was able to print a te"Internet Niue" , st page after four or five hours of fiddling, finally got it to print to the SAMBA machines, but then after reboot it wouldn't print at all. Finally got it to print to the W2K boxes by compiling a real version of Samba and setting my smb.conf files myself. Joe User wouldn't stand a chance.

**Star Office 5.2 Installation:

SuSE No problems. Click Click. Done. "Internet Niue" , Mandrake Could not get the Star Office to recognize any version of Java that I loaded in the machine including the java that comes with the Mandrake. I even compiled Sun's and still no go. I never was able to install Star Office with the java working.

**Network cards etc:

SuSE No Problems Mandrake No Problems

**Video Cards:

SuSE Found it and did it.

Mandrake Had to tell it how to find it and what it was, and spent three or four reboots trying to determine how "Internet Niue" , to do that. Had to start the install over a couple times. Almost fried one monitor because even though I told it the exact model of Philips that I run, it configured it into an out of range frequency when it rebooted, and if not for the built in safety parameters on the monitor itself, I would have fried it. Scary.

**Sound Card:

SuSE Found it, had to activate it at installation time.

Mandrake Found it, it just worked.

**GnuCash 1.4:

SuSE No Problems

Mandrake No Problems.

**Browsers and Kmail: Nothing to me"Internet Niue" , "Internet Niue" , ntion. Both were easy.

**Apparent Speed (from the User's prospective):

SuSE Mandrake Couldn't tell any difference.

**Overall Packaging and product Presentation:

SuSE Excellent CD Holder, Cute little hat pin that my wife loves, a cool decal set, really nice installation, configuration and applications manuals.

Mandrake: Plastic covers on the CDs (they won't last long), no hat pin, the manuals are incomplete for any kind of "Joe User", a sheet of mandrake decals for the front of the computer. I wasn't impressed.

**Overall impression from a "Joe User" desktop point of view:

SuSE "I can get my work done with SuSE in under an hour of installation, and it will *work* for me".

Mandrake "I can use the CDs as a mirror when I comb my hair, because I'm not going to spend the rest of my life *working* for an operating system."

**Registration:

SuSE Via Web. Instant.

Mandrake Via Web-web site crashed when I was almost registered. I don't know if I'm registered or not.

**Conclusion:

In my opinion, SuSE 7.1 is *almost* a flavor of linux that I could mail to my mother and say "put this in your computer, mom, and email me when you get it done". It's almost there. It's certainly a desktop environment that a normal person could figure out and be working in an hour or two. Or at the very least, after a little help from someone.

Mandrake is not there yet.

Comments?

On Sunday 22 July 2001 07:54, you wrote: Hello Group, I thought to contribute to this debate but from another angle SuSE 7.2 vs Mandrake 8: I `ve reinstalled SuSE7.2 for the third time in 48 hours and I still can`t get the X working correctly,so I`m bitting the bullet and downloading latest Xfree 4.1.0 which worked fine on my box when it was powered by SuSE 6.4. Who was that "unwise" person deciding to keep two different versions of Xfree in the 7.2 distribution? Mandrake 8 on other hand installed flawless in 45 minutes and worked like dream even ide-scsi emulation was automatically selected and correctly configured,SuSE take note!From a desktop point of view for me , if I was a windoze user , Mandrake is the winner by the mile.The only downside is the lack of packages selections on offer but this should not be a case of offer more of less polished product or quantity over quality.However SuSE rules,it`s just pitty that it will take me an year to perfect the box but by that time there will be another version and new bugs to squash,so I suppose back to basics again,which one is better? Have a lot of fun Alan