Re: Redhat 6.1

[Michal Jaegermann <michal ellpspace math ualberta ca>]

Izaak Bozof \ wrote:
> 
> Personally, RedHat and SuSE both have excellent points.  SuSE's main 
> weakness in my experience is the less-than-spectacular English translations 
> of their manual, but otherwise their alpha dist is excellent.

I would think that language imperfections in SuSE manuals are really
a minor point and besides there are far from beeing a sole province
of SuSE.

What personally bugs me the most in SuSE distros are three things:
  - rather spotty record in maintaing updates and fixes which are
    often late, incomplete, wrong and without sources and descriptions;
    I had really bad experiences a number of times
  - a way of maintaining most of a configuration information in one huge,
    clunky and opaque blob; this means that if you want to change your
    e-mail address, and if you are doing that in an "official way", then
    all of sudden your web server, and TeX installation, get
    reconfigured in not necessarily predictable manner (I am dead
    serious here).  If you need to maintain a few different
    configurations (think, for example, a laptop which moves) with
    few subsets which change independently then the whole thing
    exponentially explodes unless you throw away all that junk and
    maintain things yourself - but then you are screwed on updates.
    To make matters more "interesting" an odd piece of configuration,
    like routing information, is all of sudden tucked in some remote
    corner and later you scratch your head trying to figure out what
    went wrong
  - yast is terrible in __maintaining__ your system and grown men
    were reduced to tears trying to figure out how to fight it.

> Personally, I find the RH installation to be clunky and outdated.

Whatever.  I worry only about is it functional.  How many times
you are reinstalling your system?

So far none of distributions is "perfect".  I wonder if we ever
see one. :-)

  Michal