Newbie query: Ubuntu vs openSUSE

[Rameshwar Kr. Sharma]

On Sat, Dec 24, 2011 at 8:41 PM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:

> *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.

Ubuntu is great since I came to know that it offers releases as stable
as for 5 years or 3 years! Cool.

> 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.

Oh I see.

> 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

I am hearing it but I would not go for it, does it also offer a live cd?

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

> * Debian
> * Slackware
> * Gentoo
> * Arch

I would definitely now use these.