Between OpenSuse, Fedora and Ubuntu

They are the big three distros in the Linux World

OpenSuse

OpenSuse is a powerful distro, originally it came from Germany, but later the company bought by Novell which is an US company. It’s a very stable but conservative distro, they would not include the program if that’s not stable yet, For Example they still put RealPlayer^tm 10 rather than RealPlayer^tm 11 (and it almost one year after the 11^th released).

• Strength
It’s very strong and stable distro, rarely crashed (unless you try to install something which not compatible). The YAST control panel is an easy and user friendly configuration tool
• Weakness

Yet it’s stable but it’s out of date (or yet it’s out of date but it’s stable, i’m confused), you can’t enjoy the latest version of the program as soon as another distro, and it’s rather difficult to hack this distro, because the alternative package is difficult to find.

Fedora

A free operating system from the famous distro : RedHat. Fedora offers You an easy to customize system. A lot of RPM available everywhere, and it’s easy to install (like .exe programs).

• Strength

It’s customizability and lot of package resources are the main strengths of this distro because it based on RedHat which is very popular distro (Fedora is a free version of RedHat), Fedora’s repositories provide you with the latest version package and there are a lot of repos for you to get the package.

• Weakness

The latest version of program sometimes is not good for your system. If the program is not stable yet, they could make your system crashed, also the control panel is not so user friendly, the YUM system sometimes is complicated to use, it will tell you when you got an error at installing the programs, but it won’t tell you how to solve the error like YAST in OpenSuse.

Ubuntu

Ubuntu derived from Debian. Like Debian, Ubuntu just provide you with open source and free based program. If you want to install a commercial program such as Adobe Reader^tm and RealPlayer^tm, you have to install it manually using the binary package, those won’t be in the repo. There is no super user in Ubuntu, you must install program using the sudo command from your console, you must be pretty confused at first, but after you are getting used to it, you will feel easier to use it (yes, you don’t have to log out and log in, just to change some settings, all users could do it’s root function). Uniquely there is one system for one desktop manager, Ubuntu provide Gnome as it’s destop manager, Kubuntu provide KDE, and Xubuntu provide XFCE, maybe it because the users rarely change their default desktop manager, so it’s not necessary to put all the desktop manager in the options.

• Strength

This distro is in rapid growing stage, the development is very aggressive with the support form the communities which growing larger and larger. You can enjoy the latest version of the programs immediately after released, and it’s repo is always up to date. The apt system is a user friendly system, not as good as YAST, but it will tell you immediately when there is a program missing, and the apt-get will search for the program immediately.

• Weakness

Unfortunately, whether it’s very user friendly and has a lot of program in the list, it’s not as powerful as Fedora and OpenSuse when you want to use it as server. Despite there is server version available for this purpose, but the configuration system is not as advance as Suse and RedHat, you must configure it using command line not with GUI. Also, because it has only one desktop manager at the system, the program which based on another desktop may not work properly and you can’t just switch the desktop manager in order to run the program. For example, I have trouble running the Synaptic Package Manager (which based on Gnome) in Kubuntu (KDE desktop).

Conclusion

The choice is yours, choose the distro based on your purpose and need. If you want the stability and afraid of crash, use the OpenSuse. If you want to install and try a lot of programs, you should use Fedora, and if you want a user friendly and up to date system, use the Ubuntu. But once again, the choice is yours.

—
Anton Hermansyah

Tags: Linux