spongefinger

ive looked at the websites for both distros and im confused as to whether they are actually free or not.

The company lists mandriva discovery download, for example, as being about 49.99euros, but ive seen the mandriva 2007 disks selling on websites in the uk for about 8 GBP.

http://www.linuxexpress.co.uk/produc...products_id/51

what exactly is the difference between mandriva 2007 download, and the disks from that website above?

its similar with opensuse, although i dont actually know the retail price of opensuse offhand.

what are you getting extra in the download from mandriva themselves that the free download doesnt have?

anything at all, or is linuxexpress website actually doing something illegal?

AlexK

from memory, the paid downloads include X months of support and some extra software.

You can download the free version from here: http://www.mandriva.com/en/download/free

Also I am not sure about the legality of sites which "resell" linux iso's for some amount... And it is similar to SUSE 10.x and openSUSE 10.x

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daark.child

Mandriva and SUSE have versions of their distros that are free as in cost and some that you have to pay for. If you are interested in the free version of Suse, then download it from the openSUSE website. For Mandriva go to this page.

Most resellers of Linux media, sell the free versions of these distros because the free versions are usually completely opensource, so people are free to redistribute or sell them. The versions you have to pay for tend to include proprietary software.

xJuice

i just downloaded them and burned them to discs from the above sites, and still haven't payed anyone anything. well besides my ISP and Office Max for the discs lol

techieMoe

The retail versions of Mandriva and openSuSE come with printed manuals, phone and email support from their respective companies for a certain amount of time (90 days from Novell for SuSE), and often discs containing multimedia codecs and trial versions of commercial software for Linux. If none of these matter to you, you're better off downloading the free versions.

No, as stated above Linux reselling sites are really just selling you reprinted discs of the free version of these distributions, which is explicitly allowed by the GPL under its distribution rules. The discs they sell are no different than what you can burn yourself.

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spongefinger

thanks for all the answers.

places like linuxexpress are probably a god send for those folks that dont have adsl connections.

does the free version of mandriva come with cedega and the 3d desktop?

also, of the two distros, which in peoples opinions has the best hardware detection out of the box and is the most stable?

techieMoe

They are indeed. I've used similar services in the past to make up for a lack of broadband.

To the best of my knowledge, no Linux distribution on the market comes with Cedega in the package. It's a separately-licensed commercial product. If by "3D desktop" you be XGL and compiz, then yes, I believe Mandriva does come with that, and if it doesn't you can obtain it for free.

Now you're treading into completely subjective territory, and it's our forum policy to not discuss which Linux distribution is "better". The reason is that everyone is different, and what is "better" for one isn't necessarily better for someone else.

All the major Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Mandriva, Fedora, openSuSE, etc) have pretty decent hardware detection. Some even use the exact same code to do it. The main difference between the major Linux distros these days isn't features: it's personal preference and style. Try several and see what grabs you. There's a lot of them out there.

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Alboin

Don't know if it helps, but I find that the commercial versions are much nicer and more complete. I've used both Suse 9.3 (Commercial) and Suse 10.2 (Free) and I was quite surprised when I installed Suse 10.2 and found that acrobat reader wasn't installed and other such things like that. I don't know the real purpose of this post, just a note I guess.


Note: I am in no way affiliated with any commercial Linux vendor.

bryansmith

You should look into getting the non-oss disc. It includes acrobat, flash and java.

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Alboin

Is that the case? Non-oss? Hmm.. I'll have to check that out. Thanks!