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

Re:Try CentOS

[damiangerous]

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'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