Red Hat Takes Aim at SuSE, Mandrake

gowen writes "The gloves have come off in the competition between commercial linux distributions. The Register is reporting that Red Hat is offering a $10 rebate to people who upgrade to Red Hat 7.3, including those who previously used Mandrake and SuSE. Previous users of Windows are not eligible for a rebate."

Comments

Re:Why I Won't Use RedHat (Even Though It's Good)

[the_2nd_coming]

RH has offices in England, and if you think that the other Linux companies will not offer an easy upgrade path if RH is ever put out of business by such a law, you are crazy.

RH has such a big hunk of the market that all the distros would be fighing for the market.

Windows users incentives to switch to Linux

[dkh2]

1. No BSOD
2. You typically only HAVE to reboot to switch kernels. No reboot just because you upgraded a package
3. You can remove the internet browser and not break the OS
4. Upgrades tend to be free
5. Technical support does not cost $50USD/instance and $9.95/minute plus long distance charges

Need I go on?

Re:What's the Incentive?

[Razor Sex]

It really is the configuration tool. I've tried Mandrake 8.1, and SuSE 7.3, and SuSE blows Mandrake away. YaST2 is a very, very nice tool. I'm a complete Linux newbie, and I expected to have lot of configuring headaches after I jumped off Bill's ship, but YaST2 makes Linux easier to use than Windows. Prettier, IMO, as well.

I started out with SuSE, and after about two weeks, I decided to ty Mandrake, just to see what the differences between distros were (I never found a good piece telling me what they were). I found both to be a lot easier than Windows, but Mandrake just couldn't stack up to SuSE. I uninstalled Mandrake within a day or so, and am very happily using SuSE.

Also, the $80 version of SuSE is the Professional version, which you can get for (according to today's ad) $60 at Fry's. The Personal edition costs $40 direct from SuSE, and $30 or $35 at Fry's.

I would also venture to say that SuSE comes with more packages (personal vs personal) than Mandrake.

In addition, SuSE's manuals are AWESOME. There are 3 books for differenmt subject groups, and each of them are quite awesome.

And finally, SuSE just looks better. Booting up (little things like the LILO screen included), YaST2 compared to Mandrake's tool (I forget the name), plus Mandrake boots up ultra slow.

But the only real complaint I have for either is that neither had drives for my leadtek GF3 Ti200, so I have to use this TNT2 for now...

Re:Downgrade from Mandrake to RedHat?

[justsomebody]

I agree, latest 8.2 pro is polished like hell. Asdevelopment of that one goes by, I feel that there will be wizzards and setup control panels for everything by the time 9.0 is out.

Standard version you download from Internet? Well user friendly as is it is the only desktop killer wanna be distro I know. User friendly, preset and most of all considering that users are not pro's and geeks. Every newbie I installed Redhat was just dissapointed, evry newbie I installed Mandrake, stayed there and now all of them are considering Win partition as their XBox and nothing more.

Mandrake just offers best support possible for everybody not considering their knowledge.

I was already considering to move, after a long time using Redhat, there where some doubts, this add (and my dissapointment with Redhat after that moev) has just proven that this is the right time to move off Redhat.

Dual boot: How (Not) To

[HiThere]

This is a caution about dual boot systems:

Dual boot is quite useful, and I use it on my main system at work. But I don't really trust partition resizing tools. I've ended up with a few too many corrupt partition tables. So now I have a second hard disk. But if I install the boot partition on the second hard disk, then after awhile that installation fails at boot.

It took awhile to figure this out, but in the end I backed up my windows partition, reformatted my primary disk, with a boot partion, a swap partion, and a windows partition. Rolled the windows program back in (I used ghost for this). And then installed Linux. Now it works fine, without much problem. But figuring out what I needed to do was largely a matter of try something, wait til it crashes (sometimes a couple of months). Figure out what to try next. Repeat. And for the longest time, the only reliable way to boot Linux was from a floppy.

I'm not really sure that it would be appropriat to expect things to work better (though it sure would be nice). I am sure that it's appropriate to expect better diagnostics. Partition tabel corrupt is a terrible diagnostic to be the first warning sign. Particularly when it keeps you from even accessing the disk. (Interestingly, when I reformatted the system to put the boot partition on the primary disk, fsck magically recovered all of the missing data, and nothing ended up lost ... not at all what I had been expecting. I thought my hard disk had gone bad.)

Re:screw all linux companies!

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, too bad you have to copy the cover of the book:
1. As proof of purchase, send (a) a copy of your invoice or receipt for Red Hat Linux 7.3 Personal or Professional and (b) the Installation Guide cover or title page from Eligible Product