OpenSUSE or Mandriva?

posted on March 11th, 2011, 1:21 am

I am going to replace my defunct (thanks to some AMD drivers) Fedora installation with another Linux distro. I've narrowed it down to either OpenSUSE (pronounciation: open Su'sa in English, the same but with an English Z sound in German) or Mandriva. Unfortunately, all the comparisons and debates about which is better say they're damn near the same.
Suggestions?

posted on March 11th, 2011, 1:51 am

I personally find that I like OpenSUSE better, and overall seems to have slightly more community support as far as special programs and such. Unfortunately Novell recently got aquired by attachmate, and it's future is currently uncertain. Mandriva has also had it's share of problems in the past, but they are currently (as far as I know) stable.

OpenSUSE 11.4 just came out, to good reviews. I am torrenting now. You could always try the live disk.

posted on March 11th, 2011, 4:04 am

I havent run a linux distro for some time however seeing as how my windows 7 beta ran out a long time ago (it now shuts down every 2 hrs lol) on my old desktop it may be a good time to test it out again. oh you likely have seen this article if you are researching it but i found it interested The Top 7 Best Linux Distributions for You | Linux.com
I found it interesting except for the rhel part lol.

posted on March 11th, 2011, 4:43 am

Seen that, and many more comparisons. I installed OpenSUSE since overall it has more recommendations.

posted on March 11th, 2011, 5:27 am

Just out of curiosity why did you decide against Ubuntu?

posted on March 11th, 2011, 9:59 am

ubunutu is the widest useg home linux, its certainly the most user friendly and is generally good, good at many things, but not excellent at 1 thing. i use knoppix on my usb cos its better at being portable than ubuntu.

also windows 7 beta lol, is it illegal to use the beta after it ran out? if so then you could illegally obtain windows 7 another way. in for a penny in for a pound lol. i use pirated win7. yaharr

posted on March 11th, 2011, 4:10 pm

na its not illegal it just shuts down every 2 hrs lol. Honestly i forgot i had it on it i never really use it anymore i guess thats why im going to run Linux on it. I am thinking about throwing Linux on a flash drive with a few utilities (AV/AntiMalware/Defragmenter) then i can just boot a system using the flash drive and use it to fix an infected computer. Also i could completely defragment a harddrive.

posted on March 11th, 2011, 5:36 pm

linux on usb is good, i would recommend knoppix, works fine for me

posted on March 12th, 2011, 1:18 am

Open Suse is a pretty good choice to be honest, it's a good rock solid OS with a good community and very good support.

Ubuntu is good Myles but the problem is with the switch to Unity soon it kinda puts me off of it. I mean yes you can install Gnome 2.x or Gnome Shell or even Kde but it's the fact that Ubuntu will be shipping with Unity.

posted on March 12th, 2011, 1:23 am

I tried Ubuntu many months ago. I couldn't figure out how to disable the touchpad (some Ubuntu forums said to use a script, I really prefer something I don't have to run in a bash console every startup) and didn't like Gnome very much (only learned about KDE and it's awesomeness once I switched to Fedora.)

posted on March 12th, 2011, 2:54 pm

Ubuntu is good Myles but the problem is with the switch to Unity soon it kinda puts me off of it. I mean yes you can install Gnome 2.x or Gnome Shell or even Kde but it's the fact that Ubuntu will be shipping with Unity.

i dont use ubuntu. i use knoppix (which uses lxde)

the target audience of ubuntu is the mainstream, people to be convinced to switch away from windows, its not really for people who know the difference between Gnome and KDE. they just want something that works. unity looks cleaner and more simple, friendlier, and is space efficient for netbooks, linux generally performs better than windows on weak hardware as windows is bloated.

for people as smart as you, another distro is probably better than ubuntu anyway.

personally i like unity better, it will eventually use wayland instead of x, which will be good. i dont intend to ever use ubuntu though, as it doesnt fulfil any of my needs (the needs i know i have/will have, maybe one day my needs will change lol)

one thing i find interesting is to take a tablet running win7 and install a linux distro. getting the touchscreen to work always seems to be the main issue.

posted on March 12th, 2011, 4:54 pm

I am going to replace my defunct (thanks to some AMD drivers) Fedora installation with another Linux distro. I've narrowed it down to either OpenSUSE (pronounciation: open Su'sa in English, the same but with an English Z sound in German) or Mandriva. Unfortunately, all the comparisons and debates about which is better say they're damn near the same.
Suggestions?

Hello,
I'm using Mandriva 2010.2 now. Not much problem that I've encountered, and I think this is the most stable release since I've been using Mandriva in 2003. I would recommend you try openSUSE and Mandriva in virtualbox first, so that you can evaluate them equally.