Newbie query: Ubuntu vs openSUSE

[Liam Proven]

On 24 December 2011 14:42, Rameshwar Kr. Sharma
<mathsrealworld at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 24, 2011 at 7:43 PM, Billie Walsh <bilwalsh at swbell.net> wrote:
>
>> As has been suggested, getting the live CD and taking it for a test drive is
>> a good idea. That won't however tell you everything you will need to know.
>> Until you've lived with it every day for a while you won't find all the
>> things that might drive you crazy.
>
> Yes, I am downloading the Ubuntu flavor.
>
>> It's probably been seven or eight years since I started playing around with
>> Linux, Suse to be exact. My first install was a dual boot with XP. When I
>> had some time to kill I would reboot into Suse and try things to see what
>> happened. I made a lot of mistakes, even managed to kill Suse a few times.
>> All part of the learning curve I suppose. As time went on I found that I was
>> using XP less and less till one day I just started using Suse full time.
>> Over time I kept hearing about how wonderful Ubuntu was so one day I decided
>> to give it a test drive around the block. For about the past four or five
>> years I've been using Kubuntu full time with occasional forays into Windows.
>> Whenever I have to go into Windows I wish it was more like Kubuntu.
>
>> My suggestion at this point is to get the Ubuntu Live CD and boot it up.
>> Take it for a test drive. Kick the tires, check out the radio and A/C. See
>> if it looks like something you could live with. The down side is that you
>> can't really make any changes that will remain after you shut down the
>> system. If it looks good install as a dual boot, don't burn your bridges
>> just in case. Play with it for a while and see how it works for you. the
>> great thing about  Linux is that it gives you choices. If something doesn't
>> work well for you you have a choice of something else.
>
>> If I was you I would not pay to much attention to the message thread after
>> this. it will devolve into something that keeps getting further and further
>> away from your question until it dies of old age.
>
> Thanks for your nice suggestions Billie and yes I have already started
> the Ubuntu download and I would take the test drive. I would rather in
> fact, install it, try it out, ask here if get stuck, do things in
> Linux. Linux is Linux! Suse or Ubuntu! But, like Liam cleared the
> matter that package manager in Ubuntu is of great ease and better, so
> I decided finally to give the first tries to Ubuntu. I hope that I
> would get all the alternatives here itself like those I have in
> Windows, if that great and suits to me, I would also, like you abandon
> the use of Windows, and would be a Ubuntu fan ever - whether Ubuntu or
> Kubuntu but like someone told that the real is Ubuntu, the real thing
> and the easiest thing. And the Ubuntu community too seems a great
> community. Well thanks for the suggestions.

*I* think it's better. That's my personal opinion. Others will tell
you differently.

I have never had any joy with Fedora and not much with CentOS (the
free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the commercial-only product
that Fedora is a rolling alpha-test version for.)

Fedora is not intended to be stable; it is a freeware product, used to
test out new technologies that /might/ later make it into RHEL. Unlike
Ubuntu it doesn't have stable releases every so often, and it is, I
believe, harder to upgrade from one release of Fedora to a newer one,
which Ubuntu makes quite easy.

OpenSUSE is also the freeware product from a company selling
commercial Linux - SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, SLES. This is the
server product sold by Novell. (The other commenter who claims that
Novell is separate from SUSE seems to me not to understand how the
companies work or interact. SUSE is still a division of Novell; the
division's HQ has been moved back to its original home in Germany,
that's all. SUSE's products form the basis for Novell's server
software.) However, SUSE has a long history, it is designed to be
fairly stable in its own right, and it has always supported upgrading
between releases. Personally I find it *much* easier than Fedora.

Other distros you might like to have a play with include:

* Mandriva - forked off Red Hat many years ago, uses KDE and RPM;
quite friendly and helpful
* PCLinuxOS - a lighter, smaller, simpler derivative of Mandriva
* Mepis - a media-friendly remix of Debian, the same source as Ubuntu

And if you fancy something completely different:
* PC-BSD - an easy, friendly distro of FreeBSD, a totally different
underlying OS to Linux

Ones I would suggest you /avoid/ as a beginner:

* Debian
* Slackware
* Gentoo
* Arch

-- 
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