Migrating from SUSE to either Fedora or Mandriva.. advice?

Question

I am migrating from Suse to a different distro.. I suppose I don't really have a solid reason as to why I'm migrating other than I am having problems with yast and falling into total dependency hell everytime I try to change something.

I like what I've read about Fedora because it has alot of cool features and it has a good, solid community supporting it but, it's a bigger distro and slightly mainstream.. Is that a good thing? Thoughts?

I also like what I've seen with Mandriva but, it's a more obscure distro and I worry about the community and support behind it.

Also, I want a distro that can run XFCE with ease. It's really difficult to run XFCE on SUSE without serious dependency problems. Any advice on these distros?

Answer 1

Go with Fedora...great distro...if you throw it into any system with some decent horsepower it becomes graphically amazing..and runs xfce well. Last i used was fedora 8 and that was a slight pain at the time to get drivers going for Wireless but I was trying to get a wireless-n card going...Once it was running though it was beautiful...They tend to be very cutting edge...which is good but if it's and older system you might wanna drop back a release or two...And the comunity is great arguably second only to Ubuntu...but without so many beginners...so more likely that the people your talking to KNOW what their talking about instead of making guesses...which i've run into @ ubuntu. I personally had some disagreements with mandriva but that was more related to bad install media.

Answer 2

I don't why u have dependency problems with 11.0 cause its fixed all rpm flaws in suse. Maybe cause u haven't add all the repos, try the 11.0 dvd if u want XFCE. You should have dependency problems with OS 11.0 cause they have a new SAT dependency solver that solves dependencies just like debian if not better, so its obvious something is wrong, I have been using OS 11 since its come out and never faced one dependency problem with all those different desktop environments I tried out.



Fedora is just a testing ground for Redhat, so I would say Mandriva if u really want to migrate cause thats they only one that comes close to suse but be careful cause Mandriva is again a rpm distro and if u can't figure out rpm with suse's new zypper tools then mandriva will be hardware.

Answer 3

Switching from one distro that considers Dependency Hell to be a feature to another distro that considers Dependency Hell to be a feature won't resolve your issue.



Your solutions are:

1. Learn what's causing the dependency problems on your current distro and work them out through research and practical application.



2. Switch to a Apt-based distro that solves dependency issues for you.



I highly recommend Ubuntu or Debian, both of which are Apt based.



Ubuntu has excellent community support. Debian users tend to be a bit snotty and difficult to get a straight answer from.

Answer 4

Mandriva 2008.1 Spring http://www.mandriva.com/ is great and is pretty much 'out of the box' goodness. Compiz Fusion will even run off the LiveCD as it has the Nvidia graphics driver preinstalled, so you can give it a good test run before you commit yourself to a full installation.

Also although a little less user friendly there is the awesome Sabayon Linux 3.5 http://www.sabayonlinux.org/ if you download the DVD ISO image that also has ready to roll Compiz Fusion when running the LiveDVD.



The Mandriva community is pretty healthy http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/Support/Resources the Sabayon is less so http://www.sabayonlinux.org/forum/





LUg.

Answer 5

My advise from my FreeBSD experience

If you experience dep problems it is best you recompile from source

This will usually solve all problems

However the drawback is that if the software is too big recompiling takes a long time

But recompiled software usually runs faster because it is optimized for yr system

If you want to switch distro i think Fedora is good

It has been around long enough

Boots fast responsive

Good built