> I'm curious if you have ever considered or evaluted Suse for server or > work station use? I've been on RH since 6.2 but have been evaluating > Suse 8.1 and have been impressed. Your opinion would be valuable to me > based on your experience.
Yeah, we've considered lots of distributions (especially lately), and some of the conclusions are: * Debian: Lack of commercial support for those customers demanding it * Slackware: Simply no :-) * Gentoo: Have you ever waited for 6 hours whilst XFree86 etc etc is compiling because you need gd for a webpage and the webserver crashed? It's not that funny actually... * SuSE: We buy distros, but we don't buy because we haveto. We have supported RedHat financially by buying a license per server because we have the choice to do so - SuSE won't let us download ISOs (all the RH boxes are.. hmm.. somewhere :-), YaST is simply not a tool anyone here liked, etc. A positive thing about SuSE is however their long-lived support of ISDN and other "typical european" standards. Another thing is their naming policy of rpm files... alsa.rpm is a lousy filename, i'd preferr alsa-0.5.1.i386.rpm any day. Of course, there are positive and negative things about all distributions, but up to now, RedHat has been a very nice distribution for both workstation an server (it's not thinkable to have one distro for server and one for workstation, at least now when we're rolling out workstations _and_ servers running Linux to customers).. some trends are however not that good with RedHat, especially their latest errata mindset. I mean - I love APT. We use APT on our servers and at customers. We're running local APT servers, etc etc... being forced to using up2date is not something we're looking forward to (ref: a redhat salesperson at cebit confirmed that with the enterprise editions of tedhat, you won't have ftp, http or rsync-access to erratas, only via up2date). Yes, we buy redhat licences - because we have the choice. If I need a CD at a customer, I can download an ISO from any local ftp server, it's that easy. I can run the same distribution at home, etc etc - this splitting isn't positive from my point of view. Read that again - from my point of view. Choosing Red Hat Linux as a standard platform for workstations and servers was a concious choice - we run the same software on all systems, no special server editions, etc etc - the result: everything runs smoothly, and has done so since 1999. And yes - we've sent people to become RHCE-certified (I was the first one to get an RHCE certification here in Norway), etc etc... It's kinda sad to se RH "terminating" support for their standard distribution after only one year.. but I guess that's the way everything is going.. no longer installing a server and letting it run in a corner for a couple of years with automatic package download... -- Andreas-Johann Ulvestad CEO/Techie, Nixia Tel +47 23 40 03 60 | Fax +47 23 40 03 61 -- Phoebe-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/phoebe-list
