Hi guys,

I have a quick question for you.

If you were to choose the flavor of linux among Red Hat, Suse and Caldera, which one would you choose.

1) Please let me know the pros and cons of these three?
2) What is the difference between them?
3) Which has a good support?
4) Which one is more stable?
5) Does any of these have issues with Intel processor?


Just send me your thoughts. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
NRastogi

Please search these messageboards for this topic!!! This is the most asked question here. Good Luck and repost if for some reason the hundreds of posts on this don't answer your questions. The search button is up in the top right corner, sometimes it's hard to see. BTW Suse

Really.. this is material for the distributions section

Moved: as hackers_ is right, this belongs more in the distro section.

Thanks.

Gidday ...

Well, the trouble ist that this is always
subject to hardware, personal configuration,
personal preferences and some good luck :}

As for Caldera, I never managed to even get it INSTALLED on any of my machines.
RH (I've used rh6 and 7.2) was a fairly easy install but tedious to do fine-tuning...
and on my Workstation @ work and my notebook it was quite unstable, despite
ext3 it would complain about file system inconsistencies even though I always
shut my box(es) down properly, and after I lost my /usr parition in one of the forced
checks I wiped RH and replaced it with Slackware :}
As for Suse, I've been using that through versions 4.x to 7.0 and was VERY pleased
with it, the e-Mail support that is granted for the Professional edition was very good
(even though not indepth, and limited on topics like network setup or special software
configurations [proxy, firewall, ...] but that's OK, I guess, after all one gets good value
for the money) ... plus SuSE's package collection is by far the most comprehensive of
all Distros I've ever seen, and if (after moving from D to NZ) I could have got an
update version here I'd probably still be with SuSE rather than Slack ... but then again,
after only a few month of using Slack I learnt much more about the innards of Linux
than in the years before :}

Conclusion: if you *REALLY* can't move to Slack, pick SuSE ;)

Cheers,
Tink

I second the vote for SuSE out of those. Altough, I am guessing that if money is not an issue, RH support may surpass that of SuSE's. The only person I have heard of that uses Caldera on a continuing basis would be linuxcool, and he is a guru, so I don't know if it's hard to configure or not, and have no idea on the support for it.

As far as stability, well that would be flavorless, almost any distro will provide the latest stable kernel in it's newest release, and for the most part the latest stable software as well.

RH is the distro that set the standard in RPM (ie REDHAT package manager), and therefore may offer better support for problems in that area, and related ones.

SuSE seems to offer you the world at an affordable price, and has alot of things setup to "help out a n00b". They also seem to be able to provide more drivers in their distro than the others.

Caldera... linuxcool? Any insight? Thanks.

Intel processor, nope. Get the latest and greatest version of each distro, and you should have no problems even with a P4. Notice the i386 version would be the one you'd want. If they offer an i686, go for that rather for newer processors (A p3 and above I believe, someone correct me if I am wrong).

If you love the GUI, and would like to see as little of the "command line" as possible, I would lean towards SuSE. If you like industry standard setters (not compliancers but setters) then RH.

If you want my opinion (and Tinkster's) go with Slack.

Cool

RedHat leans toward being an OS for business' for use on servers. They provide (I'm told) good technical support, but at a price. The OS is "complete" but a little "Plain-Jane"

Suse leans toward being a desktop OS, although it is in common use in server applications. It tends to be more "bleeding-edge" so expect the latest stuff, with all the latest bugs. In general Suse is more fun, similar to Mandrake-Linux

Caldera concentrates on being well packaged around the KDE desktop, and therefore doesn't even offer anything else. It is well packaged, but of course KDE, while the closest thing to a consistent GUI that Linux has, is still a bit buggy. Caldera seems to be trying to capture the e-business server market these days.

Really, since you are asking this question, I'm going to assume you are a . Therefore I would start out with either Suse or Mandrake, which will give you an overview of all Linux has to offer. When you decide to actually use it for something, come back and tell us what you needs are, as well as current complaints and we'll make more recommendations.

It is also a good idea to choose among the newest releases. At any one time at least one Linux vendor has released a new distribution with all the latest stuff & bug fixes.

They all are Linux with a bunch of open-source software thrown in. Major differences are in how they install, and how their update mechanisms work. Because of these differences, they can succeed or fail at different places for people as they attempt to install and configure the OS. They all are capable to doing the same things, but some may have a lot of the work done already done for you depending on what you are trying to do. My answer is vague because I need to know how you plan to use Linux, and what you expectations from it are.

I've never used "support" from any of these. Never needed to.

For Linux to be a success for you, expect to do a lot of reading of the huge amount of documentation that will be installed from your CD's and from places on the Internet. These documents are NOT "dumbed down" like ones for other OSs, and are very informative, but also very disorganized, and often out of date. In Linux, if you can't get something to work right, it is usually because you didn't read the right document yet.

Depends on what you mean. I find the "core" OS and original Unix utilities to be very stable. Many of the fancy new GUI programs are in some state of rapid development and are not very stable yet. This includes a lot of the GUI based Linux installation and configuration programs that these Linux distributions have.

No. In fact Linux has better overall hardware support than Windows XP. I am currently running Linux on several computers that have strange or flaky hardware combinations that won't even install or run MS Windows, yet run Linux reliably. It is always good to check compatible hardware lists for any OS you are about to install. Linux, for example tends to have weak support for NEW products in categories such as: Video, Sound, Modem, USB, & Firewire. Linux support for products that are more than a year old or so is very good.

Caldera comes nicely preconfigured for a lot of things, because it has fewer choices on how to do things, some will find it easier to figure out and learn. I find it a very well polished distribution, but never used it much.

Not if you are a , unless you don't mind a very steep learning curve.
Slack is what I use, and for a lot of good reasons, but I wouldn't recommend it for new users unless they have the Patience to learn Linux from the ground up. Pure Debian is even more this way. There are some Debian based distro's that might be promising for new users: XandrOS is trying to be released in a couple of months, it might be exciting.

My first distro was Red Hat 7.2 --------> Not bad, didnt learn a great deal due to the graphical tools etc.....

Other Distros as you can see to the left

The Distro I have learnt most from is Slack

I suggest you try any of those that you have listed and once you feel comfortable then move straight to Slack.