Mandriva | Opensuse | Fedora | Other

[tommytabib]

Well,

The first distro I ever tried was Mandriva, and i really liked it so i used it for a while. Then I got slightly bored of having such a normal system, so I started experimenting with other distros; debian, ubuntu, slackware, sabayon, elive, arch, etc.....

But now, with the recent release of mandriva 2008, i switched back to mandriva and starting using it again. Once again I really liked it and used it as my main distro, though I still had other distros on the same drive.

Then I heard about the releases of Fedora 8 and Opensuse 10.3 and I thought what I would do is completely change my partition table, make mandriva my main and triple boot with opensuse and fedora just to see which is better.But after screwing my HD up i decided to wipe it and just install fedora, for no real reason at all except to try something new.

What I have discovered thus far is; mandriva looks a thousand times better than fedora (except for fedora's beautiful boot splash) and that fedora's packmanager's layout and design (based on looks) is actually better than mandriva's.

So my question is: which rpm based distro do you prefer, and why?

Thanks.

P.S. I've added the 'other' option because I really only want to decide between opensuse, fedora and mandriva but if there's an even better option please let me know.

EDIT: arghh, this was ment to be a poll. Little help someone......

[devils casper]

Hi !

I have tried all three and Fedora Core 5 was my first Linux Distro, used it for 4-5 months. I am not using any rpm based distro these days because I dont like Yum of Fedora, SuSe is a bit bloated and Mandriva, couldn't explore it well.

I am using Debian Lenny these days. KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment and Fluxbox are installed and I switch those according to my mood.

* Added Poll. Voted for Other. Is this Poll for RPM based distros only?

[daark.child]

My personal favourite is openSUSE because I think at the moment, its releases are a bit more polished than Fedora or Mandriva (although these two have also recently released excellent versions). I have used Mandrake/Mandriva user from their first ever release and for years if you were a newbie, that was the distro to use. Unfortunately the quality of their releases seems to have gone down a bit during the 9.x and 10.x era and their focus on the Club rather than the community as a whole resulted in many people abandoning it for other distros. 2007 and 2008 seems to have revived Mandrivas fortunes, but I would like to see more improvements to the GUI part of their package manager and their menus.

I have also used Red Hat/Fedora since Red Hat 6.x and Fedora from the first ever release and I think Fedora 7 and Fedora 8 are really revolutionary. I especially like how YUM has improved in these two releases and its surprisingly faster. It seems like completely dropping support for Apt/Synaptic is beginning to pay off for the Fedora devs because YUM is no longer slow and a resource hog.

[RobinVossen]

Well, I dont like RPM at all.
But then what do I prefer if it has to be a rpm based.

Well, yum is crap.. (In my eyes) and I never liked OpenSUSE (Was my first Distro I looked at 9.2) and well I dont like Mandriva.
So, well umm.. I only like Fedora abit since I have to work with it at work.
So I'd go for fedora

[Roxoff]

I've been using RedHat since 1994, and naturally switched to Fedora. My favourite distro is CentOS, I'm pretty impressed by the way RedHat make money and still contribute loads to the community. I evaluated Ubuntu fairly recently, and it's quite polished (I liked it, even though it's brown) but it couldn't do what I wanted easily, so it's back to Fedora. I tried SuSE before too, but I didn't like the way YaST would overwrite my config changes if I didn't do my system admin through that tool; so that disappeared quicker than Lewis Hamilton in a really fast car.

[oz]

Well, I dont like RPM at all.

Same here... don't like them at all, but if that's all there was, it would probably be openSuse for me.

[Dapper Dan]

I started off with Mandrake 8.2 through Mandrake 10. Then moved to Red Hat 8 through Fedora Core 2. From there, I went to SuSE Enterprise 9.2, CentOS and Fedora Core 7. I'm presently in the process of getting away from RPM based distros entirely and sticking with Ubuntu, Slackware and Crux on all my boxes.

[carlosponti]

I hate to say this but i liked fedora 8 when i tried it the other day. seemed like it was actually stable.


ps I still use ubuntu but i try others in vm that come up on distrowatch

[techieMoe]

If we're only talking about RPM distros, I'd also have to vote "Other." I've not been impressed by Fedora lately (last 3 releases actually). Same goes for openSuSE (anything after 9.x). Mandriva is inoffensive but doesn't catch my fancy all that often. My favorite RPM-based distribution would probably be CentOS.

[Thrillhouse]

I voted for Fedora. Fedora Core 3 was my first Linux distro and I still have Fedora 7 around but rarely use it anymore. I've heard good things about Mandriva before but never actually tried it. Suse's lack of a pure package manager is what gets me down on it. Yast is nice but not fully integrated and fully functional. I also think Fedora does more for the user community in general than most other distributions do.

You planning on ranting on Fedora 8, Moe? I would definitely be interested in that seeing as how I don't plan on installing it myself.