Linux has improved significantly in the last two years, a new study released Thursday has found, with a version from SuSE edging out that of rival Red Hat in the businesses features race. However, Unix still outpaces the Linux operating system in some areas, the study says.
Study: SuSE Leads in Linux Improvements
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RedHat 8’s nullification of the differences between GNOME and KDE as well as the first distro to ship with good-looking fonts out-of-the-box makes it (in my eyes) the current leader in pushing Linux desktop.
>the current leader in pushing Linux desktop.
Maybe. But this article doesn’t talk about the desktop (only).
what!! ok that is nuts. Redhat does one thing that makes their desktop look nicer for workstations and all of a sudden they are the anointed one that has done so much for linux on the desktop?
I am a debian user so I am not defending mandrake or Suse or anything but seesh mdk, suse, lycoris and xandros have dome more individualy for the linux desktop than redhat has.
> Maybe. But this article doesn’t talk about the desktop (only).
In the server area, the distributions are virtually indistinguishable…are we comparing server performance or how good a distro’s gui-setup frontend is? Honestly I can’t figure out how to get into the originating review without going through registration of some sort.
To debman: yes that’s exactly the case. I don’t use RedHat, I prefer Crux, but if you install stock RedHat 8.0 and compare it to other distros that were out at the time, you’ll see that the level of cleanliness and polish on that desktop far surpassed anything else at the time.
Hands down.
>you’ll see that the level of cleanliness and polish on that desktop far surpassed anything else at the time.
I agree on this. Red Hat is more thought out and clean UI-wise than any other distro today.
But again, this is not the focus of this study, we are OT here. Also, please keep the proper header when replying.
I agree on this. Red Hat is more thought out and clean UI-wise than any other distro today.
A gui is nice and all but what Linux distribution does IBM sell with there servers? SUSE (not RedHat). To see this for yourself, go to: http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-ss-iantip4.ht…
“SuSE leads in making Linux a windows rip-off” is more honest. SuSE’s KDE (Gnome seems to be non existant in SuSE’s universe) behaves like windows and looks like windows without having all the functions of windows. So why should I use SuSE (or Red Hat or Mandrake or …).
Linux (as a kernel) ist powerful and flexible, the “big players” should use it and create something different and better than windows, not a simple copy!
Its all well to sya they edged them out, but they should mention the features they are talking about.
The last I checked, Redhat did some real engineering and gave us NPTL and they were working on the LVM. Can anyone say which enterprise features SuSE added.
These are not yet part of AS2.1, but I think customers who license AS 2.1 are not looking for the latest features, but the best reliability. Version 8.0 is not always going to make them feel good. They want assurances that the version is going to be supported for a long time. Redhat gives them that. And it now gives them a number of options to take the most up to date, or the most stable, or something in between.
A) Windows wasn’t included in the study because it included higher level functions with the operating syster according to the article… I take this to mean that the GUI cannot be removed, and the tests they talk about (but don’t seem to link to) seem clearly non-gui in nature, they talk about the number of processors, and availability/uptime features that the big UNICES use, but linux doesn’t quite yet have… SOOOO My first point is the whole gui argument is not the point of this article
B) They say that Linux beat out the worst ranked unix, and if you followed the link like I did you would see it is Caldera’s UnixWare…. OH, I see now… SCO hasn’t improved their product in meaningful ways and is outclassed by all other UNICES, and now they sue because UNIX has lost value?
almost like I have a crystal ball…
A) Yes, they were testing server only so the GUI was unrelated.
B) This is the part I liked also… In 2001, Linux using kernel version 2.4 was beter then OpenServer and UnixWare. Which is funny because according to the IBM lawsuit, Linux couldn’t be where it is today with using UnixWare code (note that UnixWare was rated as the worst Unix on the market).
AT&T settled with the *BSD because there was so much code in the UnixWare source that came directly from the *BSD projects that they couldn’t figure out who owned what. We also know that some Linux code came from the *BSD projects… Thus Linux could have some code related to the UnixWare code.
RedHat builds an OS from free software.
SuSE and Mandrake take RedHat and add their modifications on top of it.
And some brilliant study on News.com shows that SuSE has been making improvements rapidly.
All of the GNU software improves at a remarkable rate. If you really want to understand this perhaps you should read the GPL instead of some study at News.com.
If you want the people to keep the correct header, why bother letting people edit it in the first place?
hmmm: sorry but mandrake started using Red Hat as a base but it has been long since they took off on their own. SUSE has always been their own distro AFAIK. Check your sources…
Lets face it: in the USA RH is the big player closely followed by SuSE, worldwide SuSE blows RH away and IBM is still sitting on a sea-saw, but it looks like it’s tipping in SuSE direction. RH is playing a very conservative game, it takes them ages to implement new stuff. SuSE has a more rounded palette of products ranging from all sorts of severs to the bleeding edge in desktop OS.
> RedHat builds an OS from free software.
> SuSE and Mandrake take RedHat and add their modifications on top of it.
While you are right about Mandrake, you are completely wrong about SuSE (shows how much people actually know about them compared to RedHat): SuSE is actually one year older than Red Hat and was initially based on a modified Slackware with improved tools. See eg. this mail from 1998: http://www.geocrawler.com/mail/msg.php3?msg_id=1592910&list=292
than Red Hat, IMHO because they are not so timid about things such as NTFS, MP3, and they have an excellent enterprise level distribution on top of that. Plus, their directory structure (as is Slackware’s) is much more sensible than Red Hat’s.
That said, however, I’m still a Debian user. For an experienced admin, Debian or Libranet is great for desktops and small servers. For big boxes, though, I use SuSE. I think there may be a market for a Debian-based enterprise Linux; it will be interesting to see if this ever materializes.
Sure in the server and Business, the most important thing is playing MP3 🙂 And NTFS is needed because the Business wants to dual boot and pay for both WinXP and Suse 🙂
And it is not important if the company that supports your computing department goes under because it gets sued for patent infringement:-)
Sorry, but I think you should get some real experience in the Business world!
Topos has it right. SuSE does have more packages, but they also include some that have questionable legal status. The reason RedHat plays it conservative is two-fold:
1. They are committed to only selling Free software.
2. Businesses don’t want to put themselves in potential legal trouble, and will thus avoid like the plague anything that could land them there.
NTFS resizing is a nice feature, but the very fact that you think this is a business-needed feature is weird. Have you ever tried to maintain a dual-booting system? I’ve heard many tales of how to do this, all of which end “so we don’t have dual-booting systems anymore”. NTFS resizing is almost exclusively a feature needed for dual-boots. Dual-boots aren’t used by sane system admins, ergo, it isn’t a business-needed feature. Ditto for MP3s. Solaris has neither, yet is considered a top-notch OS for servers. Please explain how this could be true with your reasoning.
Your assertion that SuSE is “blowing away” RedHat worldwide doesn’t make any sense. Pray tell, sir, where you have found SuSE’s earnings reports? I found RedHat’s, but I found over and over that SuSE doesn’t release theirs. The only place where SuSE is really beating down RedHat is in Germany, and while it’s a big market, it’s not the most important one.
Someone mentioned that IBM doesn’t use RedHat. IBM was at my college a few months ago, and they commented that they use both RedHat and SuSE… so get those facts straight. The link you cited has absolutely no relevance to servers. Direct quote:
“This article highlights the key requirements and steps for getting SuSE Linux 7.3 installed and configured on your workstation or laptop.”
Nowhere does it talk about what they use on their servers or even about servers at all. Stop with the FUD, please.
So, yes, SuSE is good, but claiming RedHat is making stupid decisions seems a bit ignorant.
-Erwos
On topic: I liked the article not for which linux is better, but rather the comparison to UNIX. I think Linux is about where it should be performance wise, being a free operating system. The article shows how quickly (12 years) that an idea has become such a great OS and how it is continuing to evolve. Some features, by the way are comming more in the hardware then just the software anyways, such as hot swapable hardware.
About RH and the gui: It was posted “Red Hat is more thought out and clean UI-wise than any other distro today.”
Clean maybe, but what a mess of the menu system they made. I mean apps are in apps, then more apps, then extra, then more…etc. YUCK (that was Redhat 8) Then RH put out RH 9 which is a joke, it should have been RH 8.1 or something like that. The menu is better, but still lame. Come on get with it. Mandrake 9.1 on the other hand installs apps into catagories that make sense. I dont have SuSe to evaluate right now, but I think if I recall the Run On CD eval, it was layed out nicely too.
Come on Redhat do things right and make a menu tree that makes sense, and although its too late, what were you thinking with jumping from 8 to 9? Whats next? Redhat X?
Dont get me wrong though. I like Linux. I am typing this on a Redhat 9 powered Laptop. I use Mandrake 9.1 at home, and at the office we have Redhat 7.1 servers, and Gentoo on the main workstation.
The RedHat GUI may look good, but it is superficial eye-candy only. Try to configure your system (thoroughly!) and you’ll find that random set of graphical “redhat configuration tools” is hardly usable. The GUI menu stucture has always been a mess in RedHat, too.
SuSE (like Debian and Mandrake) has made much more efforts in that part of the usability area. YaST2, while far from perfect and not free software, is probably the most complete and most consistent Linux configuration tool around.
Moreover, SuSE did fund some tech progress. ReiserFS, XFree86, KDE, ALSA come to mind. RedHat may have more merits at the low level (kernel proper, GNU toolchain),
but you can’t say SuSE is doing nothing. Just like RedHat, SuSE employs a number of famous Linux hackers (Andrea Arcangeli and Olaf Kirch, for example).
This is not to say that SuSE is better than RedHat. Actually, I personally migrated from SuSE to RedHat/Mandrake in 1996 and never went back. My major criticism is that SuSE (although they adopted rpm) never got package management right. And it’s too Windows-ish for my taste.
But some commenters in this forum did not pay SuSE the respect they deserve. Especially during the last year, SuSE’s distributions have proven well-balanced and stable.
Is it really necessary that followers of different Linux distributions keep throwing dirt at each other? Let’s throw it at the other side 🙂 !
I use SuSE for everything, Big boxes, Small boxes from webserver to desktop and you cannot beat the SuSE quality. I think it is a shame SCO is trolling and creating alot of flames but Linux will live through it. This is the BSD vd. USL all over again.
“The RedHat GUI may look good, but it is superficial eye-candy only. Try to configure your system (thoroughly!) and you’ll find that random set of graphical “redhat configuration tools” is hardly usable. The GUI menu stucture has always been a mess in RedHat, too.”
Frankly, I found the Red Hat 9 menu structure fairly straightforward, hardly a mess. Mandrake and SuSE 8.1 had messy menus. SuSE 8.2 menus are about as sane as Red Hat’s.
As for the config tools, I find that the GUI tools that Red Hat does have are simpler and more straightforward to use than SuSE’s. Trouble is that Red Hat’s GUI tools aren’t as comprehensive. With SuSE, one can almost get away with not having to use the command line or edit a config file at all. That cannot be said for Red Hat.
I have both SuSE 8.2 and Redhat 9. I use SuSE but Redhat’s menu is cleaner. SuSE’s is cluttered, confusing, disorganized, too much SuSE, too many duplicates, some places too deep. They should remove the “More Programs” and replace the strange names with names that make sense as Redhat has done. Also, I wish both would present the user with some menu templates or similar to choose from during installation.
“I have both SuSE 8.2 and Redhat 9. I use SuSE but Redhat’s menu is cleaner. SuSE’s is cluttered, confusing, disorganized, too much SuSE, too many duplicates, some places too deep. They should remove the “More Programs” and replace the strange names with names that make sense as Redhat has done.”
Strange. I have never encountered any of those problems with SuSE 8.2’s menus. Are you sure those menus aren’t a holdover from SuSE 8.1?
> With SuSE, one can almost get away with not having to use > the command line or edit a config file at all. That
> cannot be said for Red Hat.
That is exactly what I meant. If you provide graphical configuration tools, you should do it right:
1) command line / config file editing should become largely unnecessary,
2) The GUI tools must be able to coexist with manual config file editing.
Otherwise, the config tools are just lame marketing toys, just good enough for the ordinary online reviewer’s superficial installation tests.
YaST2, as well as Webmin and linuxconf, fulfill these requirements. RedHat’s tools don’t.