Future (RPM based) linuxen: RHEL, FC, WBEL, Mandrake, SuSE?

Tom Buskey tom at buskey.name
Sat Apr 3 04:19:01 EST 2004


> On Wed, 2004-03-31 at 11:40, Jeff Macdonald wrote:
> 
> [snip]
> 
>> > 
>> > http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/

excellent points <deleted>

>   So that's my rather biased take on it all.  Take it with a grain of
> salt, and with the disclosure that I am a known rpm bigot and still
> somewhat of a Red Hat bigot (though not as much with last year's changes
> ;-)).

I've been a fan of Redhat in the past because it was A) fairly current, 
B) easy to download, C) easy to keep up to date and D) well supported by 
3rd party vendors.

I could get a RH9 iso, burn it and have a system that most admins are 
familiar with and lots of 3rd party support.

I can do the same for my desktop with Mandrake, but I've felt vendors 
didn't support it as well as RH (ximian, VMware).  So D isn't quite 
there, but it exceeds RH with A and C (rpmdrake).

RHEL fails with B.  I also feel that Redhat isn't going to fix this and 
WBEL aims to provide this.  WBEL can fail by not being as complete as 
RHEL and D as most 3rd party vendors won't support it

Debian fails with A (the stable version is very dated).  Yes, I know 
unstable is out there, yada, yada.  It's not that obvious to a 
non-debian enthusiast.  If they fix this and get 3rd party support, it 
becomes more attractive.

SuSE fails with B; you can't download a current ISO.  You can do a 
network install, but I'd rather have a CD for when my system isn't 
connected via ethernet.  If Novell starts putting an ISO up, I can see 
SuSE becoming more mainstream.

Thoughts?



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