Novell Linux Desktop 9 Vs. Redhat Enterprise WS?

amorelock asks: "I manage a small group of 4-6 Linux software engineers / developers that are part of a larger engineering organization. Our IT department has finally, after several months of pushing-back, decided to support our Linux workstations. The have requested that we use an off the shelf distribution that will be fairly easy to manage and maintain (we're talking about Microsoft folks with practically zero Linux experience). We are evaluating both Novell Linux Desktop 9 and Redhat Enterprise WS. Have any fellow Slashdot folks had experience with either of these two distributions, and if so, what did you like or dislike about either of them?"

Comments

NLD! (bias alert!)

[swerk]

...I have to praise NLD. I'm a Novell employee. :^)

Way back when, I used Red Hat as my first serious GNU/Linux rig. I'm glad I did, it was well suited for teaching me the ropes, and my buddies knew it, at least moreso than they knew any other distro. Of course, that was a different time, Red Hat was the undisputed king of distros. Eventually I ran out of patience for RPM hell, which I'm sure has gotten much better in recent years. I wound up taking a deep breath and diving into Slackware, where I knew I'd basically be on my own. I love it, I love basically building everything myself. I should try one of these new-fangled Gentoo type distros that promise to do the grunt work for me.

At work, of course, it's SuSE and NLD, and I'm honestly very impressed with both. SuSE's my weapon of choice as a developer, but it's not hard for me to understand NLD's high marks in terms of usability and as a general Windows-replacement OS.

I'm obviously biased, and I haven't even touched a Red Hat distro in some time, apart from a short fling with Fedora on some spare hardware. And it's not as though the stuff coming out of Red Hat's been getting bad press either, both Red Hat and Novell's offerings to the business world have been really solid lately from the sounds of it. It's probably little more than a matter of taste right now. Novell obviously hopes to shift that and do some very big things in the desktop space, and I think we will. So my knee-jerk recommendation stands; Novell's not going to let you down if you're looking for a solid GNU/Linux OS but don't have any experience with such things.

Just don't let those of us with flamethrowers influence your decision. :^)

I'd have to say SUSE

[invisik]

I have somewhat of a bias being a Novell Gold Business Partner and previously being a SUSE Business Partner. But in our partnering decisions great time and painstaking care was involved evaluating and examining the market.

As many others have said, RedHat and SUSE are both enterprise-class, stable products with great tech and community support. They run lots of commercial applications without modification. Either one is a great general purpose choice for your desktop environment. I feel the NLD product has a more unifed feel and management through YAST. Many RedHat admins dislike SUSE because of YAST, that it changes many config files and no one really knows what it is doing. Be that as it may, managing your network (and possibly having somewhat less skilled Help Desk staff) is made much easier by letting YAST take on the brunt of that work. YAST is a GUI and a command-line application, so you get the best of those two worlds as well. In my typical environments, you don't want the end-user going to the command-line at all if you can help it, as YAST is a great way to keep things straight.

Both systems run Gnome or KDE, so your desktop choice would be more of a decision for how much training you can provide as well as what fits best in your environment. Again, both are enterprise-class environment and both a good choice. Both OS's can run pograms designed for either window manager (aka, you can run Gnome apps in KDE if you have the KDE libraries installed, and vice versa) so you aren't missing out on applications due to window manager issues or widget libraries.

I think Novell is pushing further with more innovations on the desktop (or "features" they are not always new to the computer world) then RedHat is at this time. The SUSE Professional product is really a test-bed for what goes into Novell Linux Desktop. It seem Fedora Core is the same, but feels more like they keep it no-cost so people will continue to use RedHat products. I'll probably get flamed for that, but that's just my impression.

Hardware support (for laptops anyway) seems better in SUSE. Fedora Core 4 won't work with my 802.11 wireless card in my IBM Thinkpad X31 (yes, have to jump through hoops to get it working). It has worked on SUSE since 9.0 out of the box (3 versions ago). But this is not a huge problem these days as you can buy your hardware with linux in mind, and more drivers for new hardware are available.

Finally, determine your support needs and see what offerings both companies have. If you have really green linux admins (like your current Windows admins probably are) you may need many incidents the first year and then fewer after that. You should be able to get a fairly customized support package from either vendor.

Best of luck on your journey!

-m

You should consult your marketing people...

[biglig2]

Seriously, they know what distro you should use.

You see, if you read your question carefully, you'll notice that you are Linux developers. Which means you are making a Linux product, that your company sells. Which means you should be using whatever distro your customers use. Marketing should have those figures for you.

Even if you're writing for some embedded box or such, find the distro closest to the one being used.

It's pretty much of a muchness for 6 machines

[ZG-Rules]

I run RHEL WS (3 and 4) for a University. There are some great things you can do for automated deployment, it's rock solid stable, works on everything but bleeding edge hardware and it does everything most people want.

That said, it's crippled in that it ships without mp3 and avi support. This is fixable (on an enterprise scale if you know what you are doing), but annoying.

If something's broken (ACLs over NFS for one) it takes RedHat a long time to acknowledge that it's broken and even longer to release a fix - despite the fact we have 16000 licences and a support contract! This is however a disadvantage of any "Enterprise" distribution.

RedHat is also gnome-centric. This is not a bad thing in itself unless you must have KDE - in which case you must be prepared for RH to say "I'm sorry we won't include because we focus on Gnome."

That said, the enterprise management tools (RedHat Network) absolutely rocks my world, but will be much less useful for 6 machines. I don't think SuSE/Novell have anything that come close to rivalling this. But YMMV of course.

I haven't used Novell Desktop 9, but I have used SuSE extensively and nominally support it for academic use. YaST is good, but then so are the redhat-config-* tools. Novell is much more KDE driven - if you like that kind of thing. SuSE Pro is much better with newer hardware and automating NVidia binary driver install (among others) - but NLD may well suffer from the same stale odour as RHEL (in the same way that Fedora Core works much better on newer hardware than RHEL - but then it is the test-bed for stuff to be included in RHEL)

To be honest, I would push your IT department to either recruit or train one or two guys up to a minimum level of Linux experience alongside their Windows Duties and pick whichever Enterprise Distribution has the best support/price balance for you. At your scale of deployment, you won't see the benefits of RHEL over NLD.