hi,
i am planning to upgrade my OS to either Fedora 10 or OpenSuSE 11.1. i am not a very big fan of Ubuntu, because like many other mad people i like to be very up-to-date with my software.in any case, i would like to have the community’s opinion on which one seems better. i know the stable releases for both are not out as yet.
also i would like to concentrate on Gnome.
for all the goodies that these two distros have to offer, fedora 10 seems more attractive as of now because of the better boot time.
but what do you people think?
please feel free to give both pros and cons for both version of the two distros.
and please be as unbiased as possible…
I have been playing around with Fedora 10, but, I don’t know, maybe it is just OpenSUSE has ruined all other distro’s for me by being so **** great. I keep coming back to OpenSUSE because it is just far more polished and for KDE, I don’t think any other distro gives such a great KDE release. Also with Gnome, OpenSUSE just seem to put more love into their releases of Gnome and KDE.
Boot time with 11.1 is improved, but I’m not that interested in boot time, to me it is the experince of using it that is more important than a few seconds in boot.
I’ve used Fedora 9, and it’s pretty stable, at least for me. I kept hearing this ‘bleeding edge’ stuff but everything went fine. Hope they fix the upgrade tools. Yum was okay but it can be a little bit slow at some times.
I’m actually making the same decision you are now, I’m leaving Ubuntu and going to either Fedora or OpenSuSE. From my own testing I’ve found Fedora really solid, bleeding-edge and stable but the look and feel of OpenSuSE is hard to beat. I would say install OpenSuSE and if you doesn’t feel right go for fedora.
I’m in a similar situation, running Ubuntu as my ‘main’ OS, but I recently installed OpenSuse 11 on a different drive, and also Fedora 10 on an older PC. I think either is a nice change from Ubuntu, I don’t know what it is, but there is something that just bothers me about Ubuntu. I REALLY like the look of Fedora 10, but I think right now I prefer OpenSuse, it’s just a solid, polished distro. And zypper is GREAT!!
Tested the last liveCDs of both, I’ll add some noise to this thread…
I cannot see the improved boot time in Fedora 10: it takes almost twice the time than openSUSE!
A really big surprise was that fedora is able to use out-of-the-box my Huawei usb modem: right click on the network manager icon, click “automatic connection”, insert your pin and you are browsing! I cannot do that with openSUSE.
openSUSE liveCD shows the partitions in the hard disk, but cannot access them. Dolphin talks about an “unidentified error” and do nothing. I’m not sure if this is only a problem with the live media. This problems does not exists in fedora.
The desktop (I’m a kde user) is more polished in openSUSE than in Fedora. There are less “backports” on the fedora side (but, is this a problem?), and the kde 4.1.2 on their liveCD is nearer to the default kde.
So you see, there are good thing and bad thing on both: I’ll wait another release to decide.
Another consideration: repositories. One interesting point on the fedora side is that they have few but huge repositories instead of lots and smalls as openSUSE. Few repositories means easy maintenance, but long download of metadata from them. The multimedia is easier in fedora than in openSUSE: for example, in openSUSE you need to uninstall xine and replace it with the packman version, while in fedora you only add a “plug-in” from the “fusion repository” (ex livna) to the installed version.
Fedora don’t use delta-rpms by default, and even if you want to use them it is not easy to configure the (few but huge) repositories: if you don’t have a good broad-band connection, then fedora is not for you.
Which one will be on my machine next year? Up to one week ago, I was sure it will be openSUSE, now I’m not sure any more.
Fedora has the same tiny icons as Red Hat 7, Ubuntu has 'em too. And worse the silly cop badge for something or other. That is on my wide screen, KDE 4 looks terrific. We are a Mac studio, Gnome looks and runs like OS 9, a mess of useless icons with little shadows.But, we look at Leopard all day;)
I doubt you can compare this based on the live cd’s.
Don’t know what you consider many, but if you have the repository for your video card driver enabled combined with OSS, NON-OSS, Packman and the Update repository nearly all software is in reach.
For multimedia you’re right, however if you don’t mind one click installs there are some easy ways to get things fixed fast.
Personally I don’t like kaffeine or Totem anyways and always install SMPlayer right away which gets rid of video related codec issues
Has Redhat/Fedora improved Yum at all in the last couple releases? Not slammin on Fedora, honestly just curious. Yum used to be so gawdawful slow. Much slower and less dependable than YaST or SuSEupdater in their worst incarnations.
The speed problem in yum are size problem with rpm: it is really funny, but up to version 10, fedora used an older rpm version than the rest of the rpm based distros…
openSUSE’s rpms use lzma compression and updates are done through delta rpms. Fedora included lzma compressed rpms only in version 10 (released today), and the default use of delta rpms is planned for version 11: now, even if you install the “presto” plugin, you need to re-configure all your repositories by hand.
yum is a good package manager, but in a default install you’ll need a really good broad-band internet connection to use it.
Those are points against fedora, I think.
I vote OpenSUSE. I worked with Fedora 10 the last few days. Fedora has a beautiful interface and I tried to make it work. But there was a big showkiller for me.
kdesu and gksu are not included in their repo. When downloaded off the web, neither program will install via Yum (their pkg mgr).
Thus I am unable to manage my files. I can’t even add or copy or delete programs off my USB drive where I have a backup copy of my data files.
For me Fedora requires more command line skills that I don’t have. It takes more setup time than OpenSUSE.
As for the forums, feedback I got was as kind as OpenSUSE. No difference. As for the distro’s quality - Just like OpenSUSE, everything generally worked well.
Thanks for this useful forum and the comments. what i feel is that people are more in favor of opensuse.
But y i m here is because i too, am very much disturbed by a very annoying bug in ubuntu 8.10. it doesn’t allow to shut down my computer, everytime i have to hard shut my computer.
i hope this is not the case with opensuse 11.
i have ubuntu 8.10 on my system with dual boot with xp. can anybody suggest me how to uninstall ubuntu and install suse on it (sorry for the wrong question in this forum) but plz can anybody suggest me the way
If you must, you can overwrite the ubuntu install by manual configuration of the partition manager during installation of opensuse and specify the / partition formally used by ubuntu (and /home if you set up a separate one) and ask for it to be reformatted.
can’t shutdown ubuntu? Have you tried ctrl-alt-F1, followed by ctrl-Alt-delete? Reboot and see what happens then.
