[SATLUG] Somewhat OT: SuSE & Novell

[Daniel J. Givens]

Geoff wrote:
> The biggest differences I'm seeing now, aren't so much the 'named
> distros', but whether or not the particular distro of interest is RPM
> based (RH, SuSE, etc) or not (Slackware, debian (and I'm not 100%
> positive that debian isn't) etc...)

Debian and its many derivatives use .deb packages. Also, rather than
yum, yast, or up2date, etc, Debian (and its derivatives) use dpkg and
apt for package management. All of the GUI tools such as Synaptic are
front-ends for apt. apt handles getting packages from repositories and
making sure dependencies are met, then once everything is downloaded,
interfaces with dpkg to install the packages.

Anyhow, I have seen several differences between the distros besides
package management. Some distros (officially) support one desktop
environment more than others. While you can install the other desktop
environments, they just don't have the same polish as the one the
distro is geared toward.

An example would be Ubuntu and Kubuntu. Ubuntu is a great Gnome
experience. Things work very smoothly and flow very nicely out of the
box. With Kubuntu, there just hasn't been as much work put into it the
KDE install. It doesn't feel as cohesive. I'm not saying Canonical is
wrong for this, I'm just saying.

Quality is also a huge varying factor between many of the distros. I
think that the quality of a distro is highly dependent on the quality
of the packages and quite frankly, some distros have some crappy
packages. SUSE and OpenSUSE has had problems lately. That's why I
stopped using SUSE 10.0 when 10.1 came out. I went back to Debian.

Why? Because the packages in Unstable were better and more stable than
what I was getting for SUSE. Not only the official packages from
Debian, but the packages from community repositories as well. The same
goes for Ubuntu and that is because Ubuntu takes packages from Debian
every six months to make their next release. Many of the other distros
don't have that quality in their main packages or their community
built packages.