Suse or Trisequel or Mandriva
I looked at my blog posts and discovered that I have no entry for Suse.
This is to rectify that omission.
Unfortunately I am bit explicit here.
Suse or Trisequel or Mandriva
Suse Linux had a special place in my choices before
it went commercial. I left Fedora and embraced Suse Linux and had been
using it from Suse 8. Till Suse 10.1 there was no problem and when it
was taken by Novel I had lot of expectations. Novel concentrated on
server but I believe like Redhat neglected the desktop version.
By Suse
11.1, I was changing my allegiance.
Mainly due to it’s failure in
commercial support of the desktop version.
It was less than ideal.
Then it’s alliance with Microsoft was not a favorable enterprise.
I will talk about the plus points first.
It had one of the best installation script even
though unlike Redhat sometimes tends to miss some of my other Linux
distributions already installed in the box. It also had a very good
partition utility when compared to other Linux distributions except
Mandrake, Debian and Redhat.
It’s YAST was a very good configuration
utility.
Its KDE was bulky but very attractive.
Then it introduced the
Suse Studio where one can Mix and Match
utilities and make one’s own Live distribution. In fact, I made one
distribution myself. ChromeOS is one of those distributions a that took
root from Suse Studio. From then onward I shifted my allegiance totally
and it’s Milestone releases are “pain in the neck” and worse than the
Fedora experience for me.
I stopped downloading and testing them after the last
version 11.2.
When I saw many innovations in other Live CD/DVDs it was
easy for me to ditch it in favor of PClinux.
Now few of my reason for ditching it.
It is bulky and consumes lot of RAM.
It is slow in boot up.
Its downloading of Linux images was bad.
It tends to pile up all the junk temporary files and
what really annoyed me was it did not have a way of cleaning up and
deleting large files. With time file corruption ensued. At that stage to
save time I had to dump it and never used it again.
It stopped reading partitions above 15 and with me
having 5 to 6 distributions in one box it was restricting my freedom.
With disks of 500 GB coming to the market restricting to 15 partition
was a stupid idea. Only Microsoft would have done it that way. New
Windows 8 not allowing alternative operations to boot is a case in
point.
It also take the belief and shoot that belief out of
window that commercial ventures do add value and complementary and
better than community work.
Suse desktop was a commercial failure for the happy faces of Microsoft and Apple CEOs.
I wanted to write about Trisequel here instead of
Suse but took the decision if I do not write little bit of Suse and its
history, justice is not done to those developers who created Suse.
Trisequel
I will be brief in here writing about Trisequel. Suse
and Mandrake took Open Software theme to the extreme and in their early
releases excluded all packages which had slightest taint of commercial
tags and did not include things like Flash and the like limiting the
functionality for those who migrating from Microsoft background. They
then bundled them in their commercial counterpart to lure them to buy
their distributions.
This was not a healthy ploy, and the clever
customer like me can see the commercial intent. I have personal
experience with Suse the details which I decline to state here.
XandosOS is another good commercial product which apply this principle.
I should close this entry with why I have not
included Mandrake. Many reasons as stated above an it’s split recently
into two. Mandrake has been acquired by a Russian company and it is
applying rigid and regimental style, somewhat akin to military. The
breakaway Mageia is not yet mature. I wish both of these en devours
success but hesitate to recommend them just for now.
Coming back to Trisequel if one wants a pure Linux
derivative and beautiful and clean distribution too, I have no
hesitation of recommending Trisequel that come from Spain and has
English version too.
It has everything except cloud utilities.
That shoots two birds with one go.
1. No commercial involvement or enticements.
2. True to it’s Linux base.
So if any Linux distribution goes commercial like
Redhat focus that commercial aspect and give customer due care which
Suse failed in desktop range. I am not stating that Redhat customer
service good. It is far from it but it knows it’s obligation and working
towards that goal at least in the server section.
Redhat is well known for failing the desktop clients.
