SuSE 7.3 vs XP

rutledjw writes: "This should be good for some flame wars. A story on HPWorld that I read about on NewsForge gives an interesting comparison between XP and Linux. I personally think the story wanders a little and wouldn't call it comprehensive, but it is interesting. It does point out a particular bottleneck in how the 2.4.x kernels handle asynchronous IO. Apparently this is being addressed in the 2.5 kernels..." It actually appears quite low-flame and balanced, and unlike some Linux vs. Windows comparisons, goes into decent detail rather than just glib generalizations.

Comments

Why SuSE?

[Lumpy]

I guess you have to pick one, but RedHat, has a more Windows-esque hardware detection system. Hell I can yank out the video card and change it and on reboot the RedHat 7.2 machine will autodetect it and change the X config for it without asking for any technical information. something that SuSE, Mandrake and the likes dont have yet.

Granted a RedHAT install is really bloated compared to the others but if you want to compare apples to apples.....

The whole article could have used a second going over before it was released.

Re:Why SuSE?

[joestar]

For your information, Mandrake Linux 8.1 has the same autodetect mechanism at boot time.

Re:Why SuSE?

[noodlez84]

As Linux becomes more and more popular, the question becomes more and more important: which distribution should I use? I use SuSE Linux for several reasons. Firstly, it is the most LSB-compliant distribution. It comes with huge amounts of software (6 CDs of binaries for the Professional version, and (arguably) SuSE has the largest security team. SuSE updates are free and released often. Announcements are even GPG-signed. According to LWN.net research, SuSE has the best security after TurboLinux (which much less security-related bugs than RedHat.

On a more subjective note, many consider SuSE to be the most polished distribution, and YaST2 is considered one of the best all-around system configuration utilities.

Re:Suse go bad

[AgTiger]

The 7.2 SuSE Distribution had definite problems. At our company, we kept all of our servers at 7.1, after hearing about and then experiencing problems with upgrades and installs with 7.2.

Because we waited a bit, and did some tests first, we weren't bitten.

However, seeing these kind of "not quite ready for prime time" errors ALMOST soured us on SuSE. Almost.

We concluded that from time to time _every_ distribution is going to have a less than stellar release, and well, that's just life and business. We concluded that we'd follow the same cautious pattern where 7.3 was concerned when it came out.

When 7.3 was released, we purchased it and did a bit of initial testing. We waited until it was available via rsync from the major mirrors and set up an in-house mirror of the 7.3 tree, and waited a bit longer to allow many more users to install from the ftp sites. Then we waited to see what kind of horror stories about installs/upgrades would show up on the SuSE mailing lists or the usenet news groups. There were very few.

We upgraded most of our main servers to 7.3, all of our workstations, and so far, everything's been running _really_ nicely.

Now for the fun part: Using VMWare 3.0 Workstation for Linux, we can run Windows operating systems like Windows 2000 Professional or Windows XP Professional if that's what a project we're working on for a client calls for. We refer to it as "Windows, in Jail", complete with the jokes to "Hi Dad, I'm in Jail" from the Was-Not-Was song. :-)

For us, it can be SuSE 7.3 and XP at the same time, but we let Linux control the underpinnings.

Oh: Tip to those wanting to go this route: Use the IDE-SCSI module, and configure your CDRom and DVD-Rom drives as SCSI drives and access them as virtual SCSI devices in Raw mode. This solves the infuriating problem of horridly slow access to the drives under VMWare when accessing drives in raw mode.