h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hello

Right, I am considering the possibility of getting a Linux distro.

I'm mainly looking at recent versions of Mandrake,red hat, and SuSe.

What do people think of them? Which is best? What is the experience people have had with them?

I'd be grateful for some honest opinions rather than industry reviewers.

Researcher PSG

My own experience of Mandrake has been very bad - I've found it to be unstable and prone to segfaulting, I don't like their artwork and I don't like the way they set things up. I also despise the RPM package format, which is the main reason I dislike Red Hat (although it also shares some of the shortcomings of Mandrake's init system and so forth, because Mandrake was once a mere fork of Red Hat).

SuSE I used for a while, found it much more acceptable than Red Hat and Mandrake, but it still uses RPMs which I always fall foul of. Don't like them.

Personally I use Gentoo Linux, which is a source-based distribution and not really to be recommended to the newbie who doesn't have someone around in RL to guide them through some of the tricky bits in the installation and use of it. You learn a lot very fast though The other big downside to Gentoo is that it takes forever to install, because you have to compile lots of stuff yourself (it's not hard, just takes ages), and if you don't have broadband you're going to be downloading stuff for a very, very long time.

Mandrake may be good for you, I don't know - like Red Hat they have good hardware detection and a decent installer. SuSE appear to have similar good stuff, not sure what it's like now though as it's a long time since I've used anything but Gentoo, Mandrake and Slackware.

You will shortly see people singing the praises of Mandrake I'm sure - a friend of mine does continually. For some bizarre reason, his never crashes. Neither does my Gentoo system - but Mandrake on my computers (not just one freaky hardware combination, I've had three installs of it over the years on different motherboards) always seems to be unstable. Maybe it doesn't like AMD processors.

My own experience of Mandrake has been very bad - I've found it to be unstable and prone to segfaulting, I don't like their artwork and I don't like the way they set things up. I also despise the RPM package format, which is the main reason I dislike Red Hat (although it also shares some of the shortcomings of Mandrake's init system and so forth, because Mandrake was once a mere fork of Red Hat).

SuSE I used for a while, found it much more acceptable than Red Hat and Mandrake, but it still uses RPMs which I always fall foul of. Don't like them.

Personally I use Gentoo Linux, which is a source-based distribution and not really to be recommended to the newbie who doesn't have someone around in RL to guide them through some of the tricky bits in the installation and use of it. You learn a lot very fast though The other big downside to Gentoo is that it takes forever to install, because you have to compile lots of stuff yourself (it's not hard, just takes ages), and if you don't have broadband you're going to be downloading stuff for a very, very long time.

Mandrake may be good for you, I don't know - like Red Hat they have good hardware detection and a decent installer. SuSE appear to have similar good stuff, not sure what it's like now though as it's a long time since I've used anything but Gentoo, Mandrake and Slackware.

You will shortly see people singing the praises of Mandrake I'm sure - a friend of mine does continually. For some bizarre reason, his never crashes. Neither does my Gentoo system - but Mandrake on my computers (not just one freaky hardware combination, I've had three installs of it over the years on different motherboards) always seems to be unstable. Maybe it doesn't like AMD processors.

oh, it was Mandrake I was actually particularlly looking at as a couple of people I know sing it's praises like your friend. But I was willing to give them all a fair hearing, after all I thought it's only two people.

Did you find it any more unstable than Windows? or is it just unstable compaired to your preferrence?

Researcher PSG

I've had very bad experences with SuSE, I plan never to install it again and now I'm stuck with Windoz sh*t XP. I can't even program website properly anymore .

The anoying thing is that I can't get hold of any thing else, I've tried to download iso's and they will never burn. I have broadband so I woun't mind compiling everything, I had to fix SuSE enough times to know my was around.

Does Gentoo alow for KDE and other XFree86 GUIs?

-- DoctorMO --

I've had good experiences with RedHat 7.2 and RedHat 8.0, as a complete newbie to Linux... but one with a *lot* of experience with computers

RPM isn't such a pain once you get the hang of it... in fact I find it pretty good.

RedHat 8.0 is also very pretty

If you want a simple view how linux works, get the KNOPPIX CD from http://www.knoppix.com/ . It is a complete bootable distro that does not write on your disk at all.

For the others, I have seen revies that the latest Mandrake is very good, but that the previous ones were difficult for newbies.

Yes, Gentoo has ebuilds for KDE and GNOME - it wouldn't be much good if it didn't DoctorMO.

And yes, I found Mandrake less stable than Windows. I think it hates me.

*grin*

Be careful, you could start a holy war in the Programmer's Corner. You've been warned .

I've had good experiences with RedHat 7.3. I enjoyed tinkering with slackware as well but it's too for most people. My experience with distros is somewhat limited, I'll admit.

I'll stick that on my todo list... Try Gentoo. any nice links?

-- DoctorMO --

P.S I will check prevouse posts again just in case...

Of course one of the advantages of Linux is that if you have access to a reasonably fast connection and a CD burner you can try as many as you want...

generally, I have found most of the distros to be pretty good if you usethe standard windows install method (install, forget extras, reinstall from scratch).

however I have also found them to be pretty ropey when it comes to upgrading from a previous distribution. most of them can survive one upgrade, providing that you have nothing non-standard (or just not on the disk) installed.

once you try and go farther than upgrading the previous issue, they all tend to get it fairly wrong. this tend to be due to the rubbish install scripts which not only make lots of assumptions to give you a "do nothing" type install, but usually use different assumptions per issue.

on the other hand, most of the people I know who are very familiar with linux swear by using any distribution, and gradually migrating it towards a source based install, upgrading individual packages as you need them.

but that is a lot of work.

generally, open source has one massive advantage over microsoft, if it breaks, you can hack it yourself and fix it. with MS, it breaks, and you are stuffed.

personally, I am moving towards a much more tricky solution. I run any old distro for the complex things, and dual boot with another linux system generated from source code with just the programs I need on it. this lets me learn the new programs one at a time, and makes it easier to get to grips with the quirky config files.

I must admit that it is one of the things that attracted me to Linux is it's adaptability. But I definately want to start with a friendly distro so I can get familiar with the code, before trying to do anything more complex. This is mainly because I hear the man pages are written in such dense techno talk that it would give the plain English campaign heart attacks.

So, to summerise so far SuSe is a pain, Mandrake can be a pain in previous versions, but the latest one is better, and Red Hat is OK, but a bit techy. I heard one review of the latest Red Hat complained about the interface, is there a problem with it?

Researcher PSG

Nice links for Gentoo? http://www.gentoo.org is a very good place to start!

Not really for the first-time dabbler though, as I've said - unless of course you like to fiddle, and you don't mind a bit of a steep learning curve and waiting a while to get a usable system (although the GRP speeds that up a bit).

No I don't mind that, I've done it with windows on a 486, and I've managed hackfull things. I'm sure I'll learn truly an anormas amount. but it will have to wait until it's got some time.

-- DoctorMO --

Anything you hear about RedHat's interface is probably just whining about how they've unified the look of KDE and GNOME in RedHat 8. Good things have come of it (a collaborative effort to standardise the interface design of Linux window managers) so I don't know why people are complaining. If they don't like the look and feel, they should change it instead of complaining about it.

Yeah -- I like the RedHat 8.0 interface...

Ah, indeed, the other advantage is you can install as many distributions as you have disk space/partitions for ... I currently have RedHats 7.2 and 8.0, as well as two Windowses...

(the one I use is 7.2, because migrating everything to 8.0 would be too much effort... my 7.2 is rather customized... upgrading a Linux system is definitely a big job)

Not as big a job as upgrading Windows... at least not in my experience.

the complaints about the current redhat focus on two issues.

first, they don't like resellers using the name redhat in their advertising. I know one company who sell boxed sets as an approved redhat agent, but despite their being wrapped in celophane, and thus unmodified, redhat sent them legalistic cease and desist notices because they actually mentioned selling it in their advertising. (note selling, note modifying).

the other problem, which is partly related is bluecurve, which is the redhat unified desktop.

you can't call it anything else really, because they have copyrighted all the icons, and a lot of the little bits of glue logic that are needed to tie it all together, and won't let anyone else use it. As this makes it a redhat only feature, it has caused quite a stink, especially as it flies in the face of the general openness of all the other distributions.

The moment you modify a redhat system, and sell it on, you have to remove all mention of redhat from the software, which is utterly stupid.

hopefully they will get sensible again before their next release.

They can't restrict use of the glue logic - most of it's modifications to GPLed source code, and so not making that code available under the GPL would be a violation of the licence. The theme engines and icons are also freely available - but I believe when outside of Red Hat they're supposed to be called Wonderland instead of Bluecurve, which is daft!

However, the Bluecurve modifications (most of which have fallen on KDE, probably because Red Hat are traditionally GNOME people) have highlighted several issues between the two desktops which is resulting in increased ccooperation between the KDE and GNOME projects - which is only for the good I think. It's just a shame Red Hat made a mess of their changes to KDE, given that they didn't actually know what they were doing...

But there are several cool interoperability things in GNOME 2.2 and KDE 3.1 - they both use freedesktop.org standards for icon themes and file thumbnailing, for example. GNOME also uses freedesktop standards for recent files lists and things - I'm not sure if KDE does yet. Oh, and they've got pretty much the same window manager hint spec too, which is one of the nastiest niggles there always was.

Personally, I don't like the Red Hat icons, but I do use the Bluecurve/Wonderland theme engines for GTK and Qt, as they're about the only non-ugly ones around at the moment. Although if you're looking for an engine that makes GTK and Qt look the same, Keramik and Geramik are your friends.