On 24/07/2004, at 8:54 PM, A. Pagaltzis wrote:
See http://www.wlug.org.nz/Suse which is mostly my doing.
What a biased piece of unsubstantiated one-eyed dribble! Suse has it stengths and its weaknesses, as do most other Linices, I should expect. How about someone writing something that is objective, insightful and fair? (I don't think I am the person. I don't know other linices well enough to really outline the similarities and differences.) Some comments that might be useful to consider (the quoted material comes from the website mentioned above):
Most seasoned users find it pretty awful as far as distributions go
Why? Just because it is not set up for seasoned users? Because it is fundamentally flawed? Do they have poor support, bad reliability, poorly arranged distributions? Do they knowingly send out official distributions compiled with a completely screwed C compiler? (Redhat has done so.) Do they mangle TeX installations to be unuseable? (Redhat does.)
Its configuration tools interfere with manual tweaking a lot of the time, and the standard install doesn't include things like a Compiler, make(1), locate(1) and others that really should be available on every "real" system.
Who are they aiming it for? Why shouldn't configuration tools interfere with manual tweaking? Do we not need a version of Linux that makes it very easy to administer? Why should compilers, make, etc., be on "real" systems? What is a "real" system? Who users compilers, etc.? Programmers, no doubt. But don't we want Linux systems for and useable by the general public? What are they going to do with a compiler, with make, etc? A programmer knows how to do extra things. Surely it is easy for a programmer to find the select development tools package group during installation? If you can't work that out (and I can tell you it is trivial to do so during a Suse installation) then you shouldn't be using a compiler. Get a life, mate, and evaluate Linices on real issues.
If you want a European beginner friendly distro, Mandrake should be a much better choice.
Why? 'Mandrake "should" be'? Or is it really? Or does it just aspire to what it should? So what makes Mandrake so good compared to Suse?
Suse never had much of a following in NewZealand.
So what? Maybe that just proves how ignorant NZers are of excellent European distributions? Without more evidence how can we know? Michael.