[luau] Mandrake vs. Red Hat

Joe Linux joelinux at earthlink.net
Thu Jun 20 04:30:00 PDT 2002


I tried RedHat 7.3 and found it very unsatisfactory for my purposes. 
 It's lacking user intuitive friendly tools for the administration of a 
"personal" computer.  For example the control panel has no provision for 
setting the screen resolution.  David Coursey, and editor on ZDnet 
recently installed it, and had the same problems.  Another "feature" 
that caused me to discontinue using it was the fact that at some point 
when I clicked on any program in the control panel, it wanted to connect 
to the Internet and wouldn't do anything with the tool I was trying to 
launch.  Basically I gave it up, and could not recommend it.  As a point 
of fact many posters on ZDnet have recommended to David Coursey that he 
switch to Mandrake.

Now it is true that Mandrake is buggy  and always has been.  For 
example, I can't properly copy CD's with "xcdroast" in Mandrake 8.2.  To 
get ready for some things associated with the CLUE group in Denver, I 
had to install Libranet 1.9.1 just to burn CD's.  Another point of fact 
is that Libranet 1.9.1 was the most user friendly, stable computer 
system I have ever used.  However at this point in time it's obsolete so 
I am using Mandrake 8.2 for the bulk of my work.  I have had no so 
called "stability" issues with it at all.

I tried SuSE 8.0 but at least on my hardware, it's not better, and 
probably not as good because it gave error messages during the install 
and it seems difficult to repair the problems.

So it's still difficult to find a Linux distribution that really is both 
solid, up to date, and user friendly.  On the other hand, Mandrake is 
very economical relatively user friendly and up to date.  So I could 
recommend it to any one who is disgusted with the proprietary closed 
source systems from Apple and Micro$oft and would like an economical 
user friendly alternative.

W. Wayne Liauh wrote:

> I received the following comment from a friend of mine:
>
> "I was using Mandrake 8.2 (and earlier 7.1 and 8.1) but recently 
> switched to Red Hat 7.3. Believe me it's better and more stable than 
> Mandrake 8.2. Mandrake has got too buggy with each new release."
>
> Does anyone know if Mandrake is any buggier than Red Hat?  Any real 
> life experience or URLs?
>
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