Suse VS Fedora
 

Hello :)


I am currently running Suse 9.2, which is going well excpet I am having some problems finding some rpms for it and I have noticed that most programs now seem to have a good selection of rpms for fedora, it is for this reason I am considering switcing to fedora 4, I am not a techie user and very much a point and click kinf of guy, I like things to be easy and simple and very userfriendly as I am very busy all the time.

Can anyone please give me an opinion on whether fedora 4 would be a better distro for me or should I stick with Suse?

What I like about Suse is -
User friendly
Easy to update
Stable

Problems I have with Suse-
Can sometimes be a little buggy and crash
Can sometimes have trouble getting software?

Anyone got any thoughts on this?
Also, when running fedora do you prefer kde or gnome?

Thanks :)

Theoretically speaking, one .rpm made for Fedora should work with SuSE or Mandrake. There're lots of things to be considered, however. For example, let's say we have a a package (gaim) for Redhat 8.0. That package would work fine with Redhat 9.0 or Fedora Core 1,2 or 3. But, a gaim package for Fedora Core 3 most likely would never work with Redhat 8.0. That's because Gaim for Fedora will use/need much newer dependencies as well not present on Redhat 8.0. You should need to upgrade the hole thing ^_^.

With that in mind, a Fedora Core 1 package should work just fine with SuSE or Mandrake. Many would not recommend doing this, but I do. Just make sure that the package is slightly older. I've done it lots of times, especially with emulators and it works just fine.

There're things you can do with SuSE to make it more pleasant to work with as well. You might want to configure your YaST to install packages from the Internet for example. Here is how you do that:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...89#post1087289

you can add extra repositories for SuSE's YaST as well. Pakman is known for having great packages. Just google for it.

Apt-get is also available for SuSE. It should help you a lot with both packages and dependencies:

http://linux01.gwdg.de/apt4rpm/index.orig.html

Here you can find plenty of rpm's too. Most for Redhat and Mandrake, but you know that's not a problem anymore ;)

http://rpm.pbone.net/

and to sum up, there're some scripts that can convert packages from one distribution (example, .deb for debian) into another (as .rpm or .tgz for Slackware). Alien is a good one and it comes with SuSE if I remember right.

It's up to you if you still want to change to Fedora. I personally dislike Fedora and love SuSE... but I did not say that ^_^.

Good luck!

I have run both distributions and the Fedora seems to have more bugs with each distribution. This is why I prefer Suse, although I do like the Fedora package.

You are right about the rpms. It seems like there are more packages available for Fedora, however there are a lot for Suse also and the Yast makes installing rpms incredibly easy.

Try the packman site for your rpms. This is a great source of rpms for Suse.

I prefer the KDE.

Stick with Suse it is not worth the hassle of changing to Fedora and etc.

I recently switched from SuSE 9.1 to Fedora Core 3. While I'm very happy with FC3 I think that suse was a lot easier to use. The redhat network is nice for updates, and Fedora has a lot of nice GUI tools, but I dont think any of them can compete with Yast. The Yast control panel makes almost every aspect of manager your linux machine so much more user friendly. I'd stick with SuSE.

I started with Mandrake back with version 9.0, stuck with them till 10.1 and Mandrake just went worse. Then I tried Slackware, it was "ok". Then I went onto Gentoo, I loved it but eventually got sick of compile times. Then came Arch Linux, wow, the best package manager for Linux IMHO. I got a little bored of Arch and moved onto Fedora, I really liked FC3, I had it running just the way I wanted, but I missed KDE. As soon as SuSE 9.3 torrents spread I started downloading, haven't looked back since ;-).

I started some decades ago with CPM and Dos, after wards Windows. Then I started suse 6.xxx . That didn't work out, but some time later I made another try. I started with Redhat 8 or so. I learned a lot of linux. Then I got Sus again and understood a lot more. Since version 7 I bought (you should support what you like) all the versions. I didn't install version 9.3 until now. One of the next weeks i'll install. I use 9.2 . I used Fc3 for some times. I like the gnome environment , it is simple and if you want to do something you can always use the console. For some time I use UBUNTU. I have installed it on an Apple G3. It is also Gnome and I like it. It works fine so at this moment I have Suse and Ubuntu that I use most. (I tried Kanotix - debian like knoppix but Ubuntu is much better)

If you want to use linux which version OS your own preference, you should not expect to press your power button and up you go. As I remember, I had a lot to study with CPM with DOS and with Windows as I have with linux. If you want to use Suse, they have 2 nice handbooks, read them and try things out. If you want to use FC you have to get their docs and study them. Linux is another approach then windows. If you use a new spreadsheet program you can bet on it that it is not the same as the one you used, so you have to study......

There are lot of programs for Suse, but it always takes some time to get them for the right version http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/index.php (Guru) has a lot of suse rpm's in various versions. Try Google.

Suse is very good, but if you use their recent version it will take some time to get recent rpm's (after all you don't pay for them and it is done by volunteers)!

That's why I always wait some time before switching and..... I keep my old version alive for some time.....

Have a lot of fun.

CloudBuilder