Headlines are funny
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| Void_Main Jul 12, 2004 4:09 PM EDT |
I think it's funny that this headline makes it look bad for Red Hat yet two articles down has a headline for the same article that looks positive for Red Hat. Numbers. :) This message was edited Jul 12, 2004 7:10 PM |
| cjcox Jul 13, 2004 7:18 AM EDT |
It was very slight. More a gain for Debian and SUSE. But we're just talking a one point gain with regards to growth. I'd love to see more SUSE out there (certainly don't mind seeing the Debian as well... it's just as manageable if not more so than Red Hat), SUSE administration is definitely the best thought out of the bunch. Even apart from YaST, you can tell the SUSE engineer's came from extensive Unix backgrounds. Besides Linus, there are many others who chose SUSE as their primary dist.... and IMHO, there's good reason. Still, we'll have to see what changes Novell is going to make. I'm not certain I can live with the bugs in Evolution, but I do like the fact that it will integrate cleanly into Exchange (haven't tried it though). If Novell can bring their NDS (or whatever they call it now) into Linux with good management tools, and make it readily available... might take SUSE into the Red Hat saturated markets of the U.S. I don't know of too many Sys Admins that didn't switch to SUSE once they tried it (vs. Red Hat). |
| Void_Main Jul 13, 2004 3:40 PM EDT |
I guess it must be regional (although I don't know where your experiences are from). Red Hat has been dominant everywhere I've been, maybe only because they are a US company where SUSE used to be a German company, not that there aren't plenty of other German companies who are quite popular in the US and in the IT area in the US. For me it's 6 of one, half dozen of the other. Don't get me wrong, I think SUSE is a very good distro and I do run it periodically, just to check out the latest from them. I think SUSE and Red Hat are fairly equal when it comes down to it. I was a senior admin on early AIX systems and AT&T UNIX systems when I first got interested in Linux. In fact it was a young admin who worked for me that brought Linux to my attention. I recall at the time only being able to run it off of floppy. There were no distributions at the time (I believe this would have been early '92). We eventually were able to grab enough pieces to run it from a hard drive and not long after that the first distro that I was aware of came out called SLS (Softlanding Systems or something like that). This made life much easier as everything was packaged up nicely and there were floppy sized packages for each part (X11, gcc, etc). I believe Slackware arose from the SLS distro which is where things really started taking off. I started really getting in to Linux at this point. We were a development shop that developed high level X based applications (weather/mapping/GIS, etc) on high end IBM hardware. I saved our shop a lot of money by dual booting around 50 PCs between Slackware and Win30, used mostly in Slackware as inexpensive alternatives to IBM X-Terminals and diskless workstations. When I look back on it I think that getting this done was quite an amazing accomplishment (politically more so than technically). So I always chuckle when I hear the "Linux is not ready for the desktop" statements. We were running it on the production desktop around '93/'94 and it blew Windows out of the water then even more so than it does now. We continued to run Slack for a while and then I heard about Red Hat coming out with a distribution. I first tried this and liked it so much over Slackware that I switched to it. Then Slackware came out with another version that I liked better than Red Hat and switched back to Slack. I think I went through one more switch back and forth and around Red Hat 4.2 I decided it was insane switching all the time so I just stuck with Red Hat from that point on. I know SUSE (or SuSE at the time) actually debuted somewhere before Red Hat and I think I actually tried the first version but at the time I don't think it was enough to sway me from Slackware. In fact at the time SuSE may have been Slack based (please correct any inaccuracies, this is all from memory). Red Hat has always kept pretty much the same file system layout throughout their upgrade process and once you learned Red Hat it was pretty easy to keep up as you upgraded to newer versions. So the only real reason I use Red Hat (and Fedora) today is because that's what I decided to commit to way back when. I knew how things worked. I could set a system in a *very* short time and have it up and doing anything that needed to be done. Of course someone who has used SUSE for a period of time would probably have the same experiences with SUSE. I also have used the heck out of Debian linux for many years now, mostly for special cases where the mainstream commercial distros don't fit. To be honest, all the other distros could wash away with the tide and I know Debian will always be around, and I would miss the others very little. In many ways it really is the best distro and you would think that it would be my overall preferred distro because it *is* community which I believe is the most important part about Linux. I think I was always on the verge of ditching Red Hat, expecting them to do something stupid and "corporate like" that would make me not want to use them any more. I have always been cautious with them, especially the day announced their IPO. I was *very* skeptical about their future. I always like the fact that they offered their complete ISO images for their lower end desktop and actually still do for the same line except they turned it over a little more to the community. I really enjoy the Fedora project. It's interesting that you mention Ximian Evolution and the Exchage connector, which I also have been using for quite some time. I created Fedora RPMS the day they GPLed it: http://voidmain.is-a-geek.net/files/RPMS/ It's also interesting that I can't get through to Novell that they are violating the GPL for a particular set of RPMS: http://voidmain.is-a-geek.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1113 I am trying to do this in the nicest way possible because I just want the source to build the Fedora RPMS to match their other RPMS of that specific version. I know it's just an oversight but I can't seem to get their attention. Another thing about Red Hat, although SUSE is right there too is the support by the vendor. The company I currently work for was already running Oracle on Red Hat Advanced Server which was fine with me as I was most familiar with it, but I would have been nearly as comfortable in SUSE. I actually have done a fair amount of work in SUSE. Just a couple of pennies to add to the thread about my Linux experience. This message was edited Jul 13, 2004 6:54 PM |
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