I was talking to the IT guys at work and we got onto the subject about distros, and this got me thinking why there are not more Distros based on Opensuse ? I wonder what makes people use Debian or Ubuntu based instead of Opensuse ? I wonder about this, just because Opensuse has so many good tools, Suse Studio comes to mind. I have played with Studio and its wild what it can do. The only other thing I can think of is they do not like .rpm and prefer .deb packages. Is there advantage to .Deb that I do not know or understand, I would like to hear your thoughts.
Yes I wondering why, Not that I would encourage it, it just seems that Ubuntu gets all the press while OPensuse is doing alot of work examples Build service, 1 click install,just to name a few. I also heard that Ubuntu has up stream issues. One last thought for you with more distros based on ubuntu each with their take on how things are to be done, they have to have have a hard time staying compatible with each other, as they keep moving further away from where they started.
Ubuntu really, is the product of excellent marketing. Yes, it works too, really well for the most part.
I don’t know too much about Ubuntu but it has it’s issues as do all OS’s.
openSUSE is much more in house distro though IMO
Will do some more research into this since I have a duel boot with Ubuntu and will live with them both for awhile and see who comes out on top, should be fun
Just be careful to exercise impartiality when making comments in the respective forums, or all hell can break loose.
I’m currently testing Ubuntu 10.10 and also have a Mint 9 installation that I mess with from time to time. Of the 2 I prefer Mint’s one bottom panel and slab menu.
wb4bbc wrote:
> … why there are not more Distros based on Opensuse ? … I have
> played with Studio and its wild what it can do.
as caf mentioned, when you have someone with money to spend on
marketing (like sending free install disks anywhere in the world for,
what five or ??? years) that is one thing…
another thing is the Studio has only been on the street about a
year…well, it was in beta a while before that, but it was pretty
darn hard to password to even try it until not so long ago…i suspect
we will see several “custom distros” and specialty boot disks (maybe
root kit and/or other malware hunter killers) come out of the Studio…
so, i think we can all pretty much agree that Ubuntu, Kbuntu, Mint
and probably a few others with Debian roots actually ADD value to the
users in some way (like, i’ve heard it said that Ubuntu is an African
word meaning “i can’t setup Debian” and Kbuntu means “hard to run KDE
on Debian”)…so, the question then becomes: this distro based on
openSUSE, what is missing in the distro that would cause users to
flock to an “improved” version?
hmmmmm, maybe a SUSE/costFree-but-nonFree (born with all the
codecs/drivers imaginable)…but, how else might openSUSE be ‘improved’?
hmmmm…i’d really like to see SUSE/JustWorks, or SUSE/UltraStable, or
SUSE/LongTerm or SUSE/for_the_non-reader
In practice there have been releases based on the current openSUSE release like the unofficial KDE3 live CD, the current KDE4.5 live CD, LXDE, L-I-F-E but they don’t look different because they tend to keep the current openSUSE artwork rather than distinguishing themselves. So it happens but in a different way from Ubuntu.
>I am not trying to bash ubuntu but just trying to understand what makes
>people use ubuntu for the Distros that they make
Not sure about anybody else, but for me -
Long term versions
Rolling updates from version to version (install once, update for a
long, long, long time)
I do NOT like to reinstall a distro from the ground up. Takes too
long getting everything configured.
Additionally, the notion that apt is a better package manager than
rpm. But that is an old, outdated mind set, when apt really was
better at resolving dependencies than rpm. Fortunately, rpm (or the
maintainers) has gotten better and rpm doesn’t have the problems it
used to when resolving dependencies.
It is an interesting question, and not one to which I can give a full answer, but:
there seem to be dozens of Ubuntu offshoots, and that is probably a deceptive impression - for most other distros, the ‘in-house’ offshoots kubuntu, edubuntu, etc, etc, wouldn’t been seen as separate items so much as ‘installation options’ of the main distro
when there have been SuSE offshoots (super? anyone remember that one? SOAD, which is an unfortunate name, has had a little attention, but I haven’t seen anything of that in the media for ages), they really don’t seem to get much publicity in the media
I wonder what makes people use Debian or Ubuntu based instead of Opensuse ?..The only other thing I can think of is they do not like .rpm and prefer .deb packages.
People (often) say that they like .deb, but they are telling lies (oh, technically, untruths). They really like the tools for manipulating .debs rather than .debs themselves. I don’t want to criticise synaptic, because it did a good job 5+ years ago, at a time when there wasn’t an equivalently good utility (that did as smooth a job, for an ordinary, non-geek, user) for .rpms. That doesn’t make .rpms bad, but the tools took rather longer to come along, and somehow people have concluded that it is rpms themselves that are to blame, and this isn’t the case, at all.
I wonder about this, just because Opensuse has so many good tools, Suse Studio comes to mind.
In part, there is a ‘first mover’ advantage, at least when it comes to mindshare. It also takes time for these things to percolate through, so the underlying organisation has to be reliably the right sort of organisation over a number of years for the organisation to be seen as trustworthy. You can criticise Debian for being slow to take up the latest developments, but no one would say ‘Yeah, we considered Debian, but with their political flip-flops on software freedom (or whatever), we didn’t feel that we could rely on them, long term’
But, no, I don’t think that I’ve got the full answer.
If you look at this timeline, you’ll see that there were three core distros in the early development of Linux on which virtually all others are based: Debian, Slackware and RedHat (SUSE was originally built on Slackware). All three were launched in 1993. There were several others at the time, but Deb/SW/RH were the three that survived. The development of Linux ultimately evolves from these three, with other distros seeking to improve or create a more specialized product. Ubuntu (Debian) came late in the game, but it has an extremely large user base, so it’s a logical place to start.
openSUSE just isn’t as popular as Ubuntu, and people are more likely to fork off of Slackware. It might just be hard to improve on, too.
openSUSE really does not need forks as it’s pretty good at the basic level.
Slackware has always been more UINX like. I was the third distro I ever installed.
Red Hat 5.something then Mandrake 6.2 and then Slackware. I went back to Mandrake and stayed there for a long time until switching to openSUSE just recently.
I have had Debian installs and have run Ubuntu as well. I have never had a problem with rpm based distros even though “apt get” is so easy to use. Zypper is just a capable if you want to use the CLI. I tend to use YAST for software management.
I have been lucky to have old hardware to test other distros without touching my everyday computer. I am pretty sure openSUSE will have to kick me out before I switch distros again.
I think you are right about your first reasons, but absolutely wrong about the last one. Do never compare rpm to apt. They are made for completely different things. The equivalent of rpm on debian is dpkg, the equivalent to apt is zypper on openSUSE.
What makes you think that rpm is any worse than dpkg for resolving dependencies? in both, .rpm and .deb you just LIST the dependencies and dpkg or rpm can check the list. Resolving is finally done by zypper/apt, and I think zypper is doing an absolutely great job with that.
But such biased opinion is a reason why Ubuntu is popular. I recently watched a video on youtube which was like “x bad things about Linux”. He was right with most of them, but he may have been so biased (while his first point was against biased users) that when talking about commercial use Redhat/Fedora (one of the biggest contributors) was the bad guy, while Canonical/Ubuntu the good guy (one of the smaller contributors and a very bad "userbase*financial_power/contributions relation). When talking about standards he blamed Fedora (which is rpm, a first level distribution, close to upstream and using mostly unpatched standard packages) while talking good about Puppy Linux (which is dpkg and a third level distribution (Debian->Ubuntu->Puppy)). It is fact, that rpm is standard, not dpkg and that’s mainly becuase the top contributors (the organised ones in corporations, projects) are all using rpm.
You can also see this in comments on Blogs, News, or Video sites: If someone is seeing pictures of OpenSolaris you can see many comments like “lol, an Ubuntu clone”, or when seeing pictures or videos of KDE: “That is Kubuntu, not KDE!”.
What is openSUSE doing for marketing? Not much, really. Just take a look at the old Website. If I am interested in a Linux distribution I go looking for their website to get informations. On the openSUSE main page you have those ridiculous “Get it” “Discover it” and “Build it” button links, but even when you click on “Discover it” you are just presented with some basic generic text like “we want to be the best and easiest to use Distribution on the world” which tells me nothing, except that it seems to be different from Slackware, Gentoo or Arch Linux, because their goal is not to be the easiest to use. While discovering the site you will see a link to “Features”. If you click on this, because you want to see what features openSUSE gives you, you will go to the feature tracker and can file feature request. Well, most users will just say “Good Bye” now. OpenSUSE do not do any advertising on its project website, it is completely focused on users that are still using it, because for them it makes sense to have the feature tracker, build service and other stuff easily accessible. But new users don’t get attracted by this site and on the long run potential users maybe become users and users maybe become happy users and happy users maybe become contributors.
I think part of it (a major part of it) is the marketing. There is another factor to consider though that is the Novell acquisition. It’s droning on in such a way that it has affected everything Novell. Now before anyone says anything for good or ill Opensuse is perceived as part of Novell. That has an effect no matter what the actual connection of Opensuse really is.
Probably a vain hope on my part, but I do hope that whoever buys the company does a better marketing job. We can start with that webpage.
Maybe even something like this: http://www.techdrivein.com/2010/09/deb-packages-now-open-with-ubuntu.html
