Suse 10.1 or Mandriva free 2006
 

I am just curious as to which you all think would be better for me and why? I currently have Suse 10.1 installed and for the most part its doing ok. Im having issues getting it to see both of my cd drives and the Yast has issues with being broken so Im using Smart package manager instead. Im not real good with Linux in general and am learning slowly as I go. So far it seems that Suse 10.1 is rather buggy which doesnt really help all that much in my learning process.
I guess what im after is opinions of the 2 disto's and the advantages and dis advantages of each one. I know that gaming is still rough with any Linux distro but I plan to try my hand at using wine to see how it all works there.

Hum? OK, well having used both in the last 6 months (and still moved on to Kubuntu) I'll give it a go.

Mandriva 2006 -from an "ease of use" point of view, it's very good (baring in mind that I was using the "paid for" version). It's quite straight forward with nice, easy package management. It's easy to get more mirrors/repositories etc up and running to get third party packages. Theres lots of support out there. The default packages are a varied and IMO good selection. Additional ones that I installed seemed to "just work".

Downside, well it's not quite as "cutting edge" as SuSE 10.1 - i.e. I wanted to try the mega eye candy that is Xgl/Compiz and I couldn't find any stuff about it i.e. it would probably have been that I'd have had to install it from tar.gz files. Hence I gave the SuSE 10.1 a try.

SuSE 10.1 - well it installed fine, but when it came to package management - it's good, but it didn't seem to be as straight forward as the Mandriva. You can add additional repositories/mirrors, but it's not so straight forward a process as it was with Mandriva (I should point out, that if at all possible, I would only install packages that had been prepared for the specific distro i.e. SuSE rpm's for SuSE and Mandriva ones for mandriva - I found that to try to install a mix 'n match was possible, but often led to "dependency hell").

As already mentioned, package management under Mandriva is better than SuSE, though to be fair, I'd been using various Mandrake/Mandriva for 3 > 4 years on and off. I found the way that SuSE wanted to do things, not quite so straight forward or n00b friendly.

If a completely new user asked me, I would say that either mandriva or the one that I currently use, Kubuntu (which is the kde front ended version of Ubuntu, which is gnome based - I've tried but never really got on with gnome).

Like Mandriva, I've had no real problems with Kubuntu and it's packages are as easy to install/update. There are plenty of up to date packages so I can get most of the eye candy that I want. As it's debian based, it has access to just about the largest package list of any single distro. It's only one disc so it's quite easy to get downloaded i.e. no lengthy list of CD's.

It's fair to say that between mandriva and SuSE, SuSE should win hands down, because it's owned by Novell, who have lots of money to throw at it, plus they've started the "openSuSE" thing so it has greater community backing - I suspect that the Novell connection is why it is slightly more "cutting edge".

Nah! I'm trying to run it through my head, but I still feel that if you tried Kubuntu, you wouldn't go far wrong. You get it installed, ensure it's connected to the net, modify the "sources.list" (which is where you tell it which mirrors you want to be able to get packages from) and then run "synaptic" package manager. If you didn't understand how to change the sources.list stuff, you can find excellent advice here it's just a case of clicking a few boxes and getting the automatically prepared file and copying it to the correct location and off you go.

The upside of (K)Ubuntu is that the debian connection means that it's whats known as a "meta" distibution. So when the next verion is released, you just change the name for the distro in the sources and it will update/upgrade the whole thing. You can't do that with either SuSE or Mandriva as far as I've been aware.

At the end of the day, it's your system, your choice. See if you can find any reviews too read. There was a recent "face off" in the online magazine "Tux" and mandriva came top, but with (K)Ubuntu close behind, SuSE was about 5th ot 6th.

HTH

John

I would say mandriva is easier to use the suse 10.1

The package management is a snap. Siomethings are a bit buggy e.g. Kat ht otherwise its quite good.

Its faster all round compared to suse. The graphical configurations tools are as good as suse. Ok the packages are older but mandriva 2006 was released a little while back and suse 10.1 is new. I you want newer applicatiosn you can go to the cooker repos or use the seer of souls repositories which backport alot of applications from cooker so they work ok with the current stable release.

However I would say go with pclinuxos over mandriva. Its virtually identical, its based off of mandriva but its package management is even better. Plus it comes with a trolly load of applications on the one cd and an awful lot of drivers already.

Okay, I'm beginning to understand what eye candy means, something that is more visually stunning and graphical. If so, Mandriva really isn't, but I prefer Mandriva over Suse. I have both, but I generally just use Mandriva; being I was told it was quite easy and user friendly.
As for games, try http://www.cedega.com

I periodically try different distros, and one I installed recently is SuSE 10.1. I have used Mandrake in the past. Mandrake is simpler, but less powerful. If you want simple, I implore you to try Fedora Core 5.

I found SuSE 10.1 removed yast2 from the KDE menu. So, you have to do:

alt+F2 and launch yast2 as root. Then you get all the old SuSE stuff that works, in the x server graphical desktop. The new package management in SuSE 10.1 is a total mystery to me. I didn't even bother with it after it failed the first time. I found it really easy to install SuSE 10.1 from mirror/opensuse/distribution/SL-10.1/inst-sources/boot/boot.iso

Which is a network (read internet) install CD. Mirror just means any mirror, like:

ftp://mirrors.kernel.org

O no another one....do I take the red or the green apple, or which tast better the white or the brown egg...

Everybody is different, and everybody has his own reason why they are using the distribution they are using, wait what is my reason...o no why I'm using Fedora Core 5 and not ....

I'm using Fedora because there is on the same network as me a repo for updates, which give me lightning speed downloads. By the way Fedora or any other Linux distro is fully adjustable to the needs of the user.....