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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?"
It's a tough choice, but I guess I'd go with Solaris 10.
correction.... How many times do have to read these "shootouts" here that devolve into conversations, not about the two distributions and enterprise support and interoperability, BUT other distros that will never be seen in a production environment?
Why would he want to do that? CentOS is RedHat for free without the support. As a business that will rely on these machines, they're willing to pay money for the assurance that they'll have Red Hat's assistance if necessary. When someone is willing to pay to get what they need, it doesn't make sense to offer something that isn't what they need with the incentive that "it's free".
I hope this has changed in a year as Novell - but I'm guessing prolly not.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I rather think that most of you so far have failed to grasp what SHOULD be the question here...
he said we're talking about Microsoft folks with practically zero Linux experience
I rather think IMHO the correct question is "WHO has the best support."
If his MS folks are to feel good about this, pick the distro with the best support. phone, email, in person, or web.
ur just a gentoo h8r! i spent weeks pimpin my CFLAGS and now ill bet i can engineer twice as fast as the looser who submitted this!
...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.
Lack of a sense of humor is distasteful here on slashdot. Please find the restroom, take a dump, and lighten up.
Infuriate left and right
I prefer SuSE, hands down over RH.
However, if I were looking for a WinDoze replacement, I think you should look at Xandros for the desktop.
HexaByte - he's a square and a half!
Having used both RHEL (albeit only for a few days) and Suse recently, I can say that I feel RHEL is the better distro.
Actually, I was looking on the Suse website and somehow ended up at a German page. Clicking back loaded the previous page in German as well, and so on. That made it even easier to justify downloading the RHEL evaluation.
RHEL installed with minimal fuss. All the hardware in my PC was picked up, including the wireless networking and bluetooth. The installer is pretty-much Fedora but RedHat branded. The whole thing feels much like Fedora, but obviously there are some improvements and proprietary parts.
We are trying to get ClearCase installed on RHEL ES4, but it's proving to be ellusive even though Rational claims it's fully supported. I'm going through the second round of ClearCase patches now to try and fix the userspace and stop the kernel panics (it is a ClearCase problem - doesn't do it until clearcase is installed).
All I can suggest to the OP is download both the evaluations; Suse/Novel have a DVD download and RHEL comes as 4 CDs. You have to register with the respective companies and you get a 30 day trial. Run them on two similar machines, side-by-side and see how they stack up in terms of a few criteria that are important to you.
I drink to make other people interesting!
His post *does* add something. It points out the fact salient that CentOS doesn't have some company behind it suporting it. If this fellow is torn between NLD9 and RHWS, it is a safe guess that the IT department where he works is looking for somewhere to get buy support. So, when there's a vunerability, it gets patched ASAP, and they're provided with easy-to-install packaeges, rather than a kernel tarball and a HOWTO. You can argue until the robotic cow overlords come home about whether or not that's something hardcore folks care about, but some people want it, and it doesn't matter why all that much to the rest of us...
/.s I've read/participated in, there's usually a lot of bickering/debate like this... And usually, the original asker isn't around to clear these things up. Which leaves us with an superthread with lots of useless, argumentative sentences... *shrug*
I imagine there are lots of business out there who use Linux without a support contract. And maybe this guy's IT dept isn't interested in one- but the facts point to a different conclusion. Maybe he could comment?
Speaking of which, it's kind of funny- on the vast majority of Ask
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
YAST is a kickass tool for newbies to manage linux. I personally think the curses version is nearly identical to managing a NetWare console --as elegant as it is simple. NLD has a very easy installation.
The integration work that Novell has done with the UI is quite nice. Novell has provided some nice OOo integration with network file access, dialog boxes and improved printing. Additional plusses include the fact that they aquired Ximian which means full Evolution support. I'm not sure how RH supports their bundled apps.
RHEL/WS is probably a well supported OS from a system standpoint, but I just don't see them to be serious about the desktop. Security patches is probably the most you can expect from RH. Although, their organization has been very responsive and helpful to anything I've needed.
Regarding pricing, Novell seems to have RedHat beat.
IMHO, NLD has a product that can enable them to lead the linux desktop movement. Now they just need to work on the marketing piece.
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
http://www.invisik.com
Well, you can get them anyway - just send a SASE. But it would be kind of silly to put a NLD sticker on your RH box...
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
I've used Debian in the past and liked it (tho i'm currently a hardened gentoo user). I'm really just looking for a distro that is easy for non linux folks to manage / maintain.
Thanks for the reply...
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.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
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.