Newbie query: Ubuntu vs openSUSE

[Liam Proven]

On 23 December 2011 19:16, Ric Moore <wayward4now at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/23/2011 01:49 PM, sdavmor wrote:
>>
>> On 12/23/2011 08:07 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
>>
>> [snip all the well-written well-thought out response]
>>
>>> In summary:
>>>
>>> Ubuntu: relatively small, modern, simple, streamlined. Very easy
>>> andpolished.
>>>
>>> SUSE: big, very capable, quite complex, many many options. Good
>>> admin tools but software management inferior, as is that of all
>>> the RPM-based distros.
>>
>>
>> That's an excellent summary you've provided, Liam.
>
>
> Liam, somehow you're coming off dissing rpm, which I'm sure wasn't your
> intent.

Well, actually...

I used RPM-based distros for many years. Red Hat, Caldera (as we've
discussed on the Bikeshed list) and then SUSE. I also used to review
Linux distros for various magazines, including PC Pro, Personal
Computer World and others - so at that time, in the late 1990s, I was
familiar with pretty much all of them.

At the time, the choice was fairly stark - user friendliness, distros
that were easy to install and to use, which were feature-complete and
friendly - mostly based on RPM; or hardcore hacker distros, or ones
that were commercial or somewhat limited; in many cases, based on
.DEB.

Ubuntu was /the/ distro that changed this. It gave Debian the
friendliness and simplicity that it lacked, the completeness that
Stormix didn't offer, the simplicity that you had to pay for with
Corel or Xandros or Libranet. It didn't and doesn't give the
sophisticated, complete, setup and admin tools that SUSE or something
did. Ubuntu won't help you find the IRQ of your graphics card, or let
you set your preferred colour depth on the screen, or install the
driver you want for your sound card - it assumes that this is
automatic on all modern hardware. And mostly, it is.

But Ubuntu takes .deb and apt-get and makes it easy and simple.

And, yes, after /considerable/ experience with RPM in both
research/testing and commercial environments, compared with the
simplicity and power and flexibility of apt-get, yes, I *do* think
that RPM is /considerably/ inferior.

I have experimented with automatic dependency resolution in YAST and
found it quite poor. I've also played with YUM and URPMI and whereas
they worked OK, I've heard far more horror stories about them than I
ever have about apt-get.

Certainly, 21st century RPM has fixed most of the issues. It does now
have dependency resolution and so on.

SUSE also has the option of APT4RPM, which ports APT-GET onto the
underpinnings of RPM rather than DPKG and .DEB. This works
surprisingly well and I personally think SUSE were fools /not/ to
adopt it and move YAST2 over to calling APT4RPM instead of doing its
own job. But even so, you can't do things like complete distribution
upgrades with RPM, not even APT4RPM.

So, yes, the gap has narrowed, but still, even today, the Debian
family don't have the admin tools that SUSE boasts, and the RPM-based
distros don't have the elegant, mature package-management system that
the Debian family do.

-- 
Liam Proven • Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk • GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
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