-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Shriramana Sharma wrote: > Monday 10 Oct 2005 12:00 samaye Randall R Schulz alekhiit: >> I think what Pascal meant is of all the strengths and weaknesses of SuSE >> Linux, its relatively small user community is a significant weakness.
Yes, I definately meant the _size_ of its community, not its quality ;) Neither did I meant the quality of the distribution. I believe SUSE is superior to the other Linux distributions for most things. > Hmm. I thought second to Red Hat SUSE was the most widespread distribution? It definately is... in a corporate environment. RHES and SLES are the most widespread enterprise distributions. > Aren't RH, SUSE and Debian the big three in the Linux world? Yes. There are several distributions based on Redhat/Fedora. Same goes for Debian, Ubuntu & co. The SUSE Linux user community is smaller than the two above, although the quality of the distribution is superior in most areas. The first has a number of reasons, from my experience: 1) SUSE Linux was always tagged as being "commercial", "not open source", evil, whatever, by Debian-alike FOSS "extremists" (not necessarely negative, we also need that kind of people). That, again is because of three things: a) SUSE Linux used to be available only as a boxed set, had to be bought for money, and only came out "for free" on FTP servers 1 month after the release of the box. b) YaST2 wasn't GPL until recently. c) some people are stupid, and rumours stay for long, even when wrong 2) SUSE Linux was an european (german, actually) distribution, whereas Redhat/Fedora is an american one. While this is not true as of today, Novell having bought SUSE, I think it was a cause in the past, because people in the USA are rather protective and use US products first. Note that this isn't a criticism by itself, one of the reasons I always used SUSE is that it was an european distro ;) (or rather, engineered by europeans, which is still true as of now) SUSE Linux has a very strong community in Germany (I'm talking about numbers), but outside of it, it comes behind Fedora and Debian. But the openSUSE move is a good one, and that situation will most definately change soon. Let's work on it ;) And as far as packagers are concerned, the difference is huge. Besides the Packman team, James Ogley's, 5 or 6 suser-* repositories on gwdg.de and mine... there's near nothing as 3rd party repositories for SUSE Linux. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure there's not much more to it. Believe it or not, but having a large number of good packagers has a direct impact on the size of the userbase. > And possibly the one reason for RH being more spread out than SUSE is that RH > is based in the US where there are possibly many many more companies, > especially those relating to computers, than in Europe? [If I've got my > figures mixed up please don't hit me on the head too harsh! :)] I'm talking about the community, not businesses. Businesses don't make up the user community, and they mostly buy enterprise distributions (RHES and SLES). > Anyway, how exactly do we know that SUSE has a relatively smaller user > community? You concede that you don't have numbers, and neither do I. But > until such stats are available, we can neither claim that SUSE has a small or > large user base. Isn't that right? 10 years of experience with Linux. That's why I can claim that. >> You may or may not know that Pascal spends considerable time making >> available the latest and greatest in RPMs for versions of SuSE He's the >> person behind Guru's RPM Site: > Wow! I didn't know that. I've never even seen this site before. Looks great, > however! Thanks :) >> Pascal is certainly not slamming the user community his own actions >> serve so well. Definately not ! I'd be the last to do so :) Sorry if someone got my previous mail wrong, I meant the *size* of the community. > Of course not. I was just curious as to what the exact reason is that Pascal > said what he said. Believe me, it's a while I'm on the Linux and FOSS bandwagon. I really think my statement is accurate ;) cheers - -- -o) Pascal Bleser http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/ /\\ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> _\_v The more things change, the more they stay insane. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFDSqdEr3NMWliFcXcRAolWAJ9q7IzbSvEVsW+tmrlN0p6RxhprsgCaAtFl kWGCNtvrX+Sgworpf9MRLoQ= =a+xJ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
