I would like to know what do you think about how Mandriva and OpenSUSE compare against each other.
Both are very easy to use, both have excellent system administration utilities (Mandriva Control Center and YAST respectively).
Please tell me which one you like more and why.
openSuSE!
Did you honestly think you would get a different answer than that in the openSuSE forum?
Though credit to Mandriva, it’s a nice distro.
I can’t tell anything about Mandriva but i tried Fedora 11 Beta.
Still YaST seals the deal here 
Best central system managing tool every distro should havelol!
I missed a “proprietary” or distro specific tools like partitioner etc.
If you want to compare distro’s, go to
DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD.
I think a better question would be to ask what features users find best with Mandriva.
Ok then;)
I got “a little” offtopic.
Is there anything special in madriva that tears it apart from other Linux distros?
i know, really.
why don’t i do a poll on here on what OS people prefer… :sarcastic:
i do like mandriva though, but we’ll see how 2009.1 shakes out.
to be honest, there isn’t a whole lot that seperates linux distros these days besides how it works with your computer. if my fav distro doesn’t work with said hardware, i try something else. and guess what? i always get it to work with something. i’m good.
I tasted a lot of distros before i definitly begin to use openSUSE…for me openSUSE is the perfect mix of easy to use tools (yast, 1-click installation, packmansoftware) and professionality for working every day with this software…
I tried Mandriva just out of curiosity and because of this thread and i must say that Mandriva would be my second best distro if i had to choose. First would be openSUSE (i love YaST though Mandriva has a very similar system management tool and maybe even better), i like in Mandriva the idea of having all the repos available and that i can choose which to subscribe, i recently wrote on openFATE a “request” for such thing to be able to browse through repositories from YaST level
i recently wrote on openFATE a “request” for such thing to be able to browse through repositories from YaST level
I too like this idea.
I was a RedHat user (Fedora was not there at that time) before I completely switched to SuSE and then openSUSE. There is nothing like Yast in RedHat.
hmmm so it looks Mandriva has been doing a good job then. Back in the days, I started out with Mandrake Linux 8.1 (I think?). This specific version was pretty bad but it got me started with Linux and ignited my curiosity about this OS. I remember being very excited using command line programs and such. I also remember at that time, the kernel used in this version (2.4.8) didn’t had support for my then new SiS962 southbridge chipset so I had to manually force DMA on my harddrives with hdparm or else I was stuck with a very slow system
It’s good to see Mandriva has come a long way. A few years ago, they were almost bankrupt 
Comparing between both of my favorite distros is always interesting. Opensuse and Mandriva have been my favorites for years now, with Mandriva having that extra edge over Opensuse. I’m more of a KDE user so all of my POV’s are from KDE…
Control Centers: Yast and Mandriva Control Center (MCC) are the two most powerful configuration tools currently…and while both of them are really really good, Yast is more of everything including the kitchen sink, while MCC has just the right choices and options. For me, the MCC is perfectly fine…Yast is a slight overkill here.
KDE Implementation: Now this would be controversial in an Opensuse forum, but Mandriva’s KDE 4.2.2 has it beat by a long margin. I’ve tested the Cooker and 2009.0 versions with 11.1/11.0…and they have Opensuse beat by the sheer stability of their implementation, the right integration in all of their apps, a good functioning K3B (since the lead developer works for Mandriva) and a good implementation of Qt 4.5 with KDE 4.2.2
Package Manager: urpmi vs zypper…urpmi beats zypper again. zypper is good, very good but it has some quirks of its own. For example, if I place a lock on a particular rpm that I don’t wanna modify, a zypper dup will override that lock…only zypper up -t <patch,package> honors the lock.
By contrast, if a package is placed in urpmi under the /etc/urpmi/skip.list, it never ever gets touched.
On the whole, Mandriva has found its edge…and it is very well put together, has a great repository (Official+PLF+MIB). It is extremely easy to configure repositories (there are only a max of 2 that one needs…PLF and Official)…while in Opensuse it is a pain to add each one of the BS repositories. While Yast has all of the community repos listed, but it isn’t an exhaustive list…several repos are missing. Also Mandriva has a good mirror network spread right across the world, whereas Opensuse’s primary mirrors are based in Germany only. Sort of a pain for users in Asia like me.
I greatly respect Opensuse and it is my second choice distro with 99 marks and Mandriva getting 99.5/100 I might end up with Opensuse ultimately for support reasons from my vendor…but I will not be greatly disappointed as I am very familiar with Opensuse.
-Anshul
are you talking about mirrors regarding OBS? Because that uses MirrorBrain and redirectly the user automatically to the closest mirror, afaik
True, it does redirect me to the nearest mirror…and my case its the mirror.in.th (Thailand- closest to India), which is really really slow. It frequently disconnects and cannot reconnect again. IThus, I prefer to keep the ftp5.gwdg.de mirror as the primary one. Packman doesn’t use Mirrorbrain, its servers get quickly overloaded leading to dropped connections. Consider this, Opensuse’s BS repos are located on a handful of mirrors worldwide…widehat, gwdg, twaren.net come to mind immediately.
OTOH, Mandriva uses something vaguely similar and called GeoIP where it redirects me to a mirror in China or Singapore. Now if the connection gets broken midway and since they use aria2 as the default downloader, it switches me to a Taiwan or Japan mirror…all of it seamlessly. Even PLF (Packman’s Mandriva counterpart) uses the GeoIP concept and it works very well. They have a bigger and better clutch of “uber-mirrors” like distrib-coffee, carroll.cac.psu, twaren.net and free.fr as compared to Opensuse.
Mirrorbrain is a good concept, provided zypper allows us to select between aria2, wget, curl as the default downloader. Currently it cannot…whereas urpmi allows you to. This is a BIG difference as I prefer aria2 due to its segmented downloading capabilities.
-Anshul
I can see how Mandriva’s approach to this is better in some areas compared to SUSE. Maybe you should subscribe to the mailing list and raise this issue? Possibly someone can improve the current situation of slow mirrors
Intelligent mirror selection should consider factors like the availability and bandwidth of the fiber that interconnect various parts of the world. Geographical proximity is not the same as “digital” proximity. Most of the Asian countries including Middle East do have this problem.
I started in Linux with Mandriva, I used it from (9.1?) to 2006. No real problems, but I like to have the latest versions of apps… openSUSE, with the Build Service, made it really easy to me while with Mandriva I had no way but compile it myself. Now they have a backports repository, not sure about the exact policy. I also didn’t like the “Club” thing from Mandriva, but that also changed.
YaST/MCC… I don’t really use them 99% of time. I run YaST when I install the system and I want to change four of five things, but after that I rarelly need to change anything else. So, it isn’t so important to me.
Package manager. Well, openSUSE has a mathematically perfect (really!! there is a paper with the math demonstration… where it is also shown that APT is imperfect) dependency resolution system… Mandriva can say the same?
And ZYpp can use ARIA2!! See ZYpp 6.2.1, no mirror will stop you at Duncan Mac-Vicar P.
After all, I really prefer ZYpp to URPMx.
They aren’t so different.
…99% the same, but newer (officially unsupported) apps available in openSUSE.
Hi
Have you tried this command?
/sbin/yast2 webpin_package_search
Webpin
search in YaST for openSUSE 11.1
–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° (Linux Counter #276890)
openSUSE 11.1 (i586) Kernel 2.6.27.21-0.1-pae
up 8:01, 2 users, load average: 0.33, 0.22, 0.46
ASUS eeePC 1000HE ATOM N280 1.66GHz | GPU Mobile 945GM/GMS/GME
After reading this thread thought I would through it into vmware already I’m being won over.
The idea of selecting profiles for the usage of pc seems a brilliant idea. Intrigued to find out if they use the same kernel for desktop profile and a server.
Well i tried that and the problem is it didn’t find what i wanted, it even differed a lot than when i searched for the same thing here Software.openSUSE.org
So Mandriva is the second choice for me especially that they have newer packages now with newer kernel etc;) VirtualBox it is then!!