SuSE → (K)Ubuntu

After moving to SuSE for practical reasons I stayed with SuSE for almost three years. 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 10.0 were good releases. I did not install every one but I got to use every one quite frequently (I only had 9.1 and 10.0 - they were OK for me and I had more important stuff to do than install the distribution du jour all the time). But in the university we had 9.2 on some and 9.3 on other computers.

• It did not upgrade cleanly, even a clean 10.0 installation,
• It was missing graphics drivers that were in 10.0,
• It introduced - again(!) - a completely revised package management system, which was also buggy as hell,
• It was a lot slower than 10.0 was (at least in terms of booting, waking up from sleep on my hardware, and starting up KDE).

I guess the main problem was the new packageing system, which was written in C# with Mono (!!!) and excruciatingly slow. SuSE could not run on a Pentium 4 with 256MB because once a day when the packaging system updated itself, this process would eat almost 400MB and the machine would swap itself to death.
I'm sure it had lots of nice enterprise deployment features, central management and so on (and honestly - I'm missing these in Ubuntu, at least in theory) - but when you have to wait a minute (!!!) for a command line application to parse the package database and actually start installing the requested package, then something is going wrong.

I had been looking at Ubuntu for a while, because I'm an "old" Debian veteran and the first thing I always did within SuSE was install APT. :-) (BTW, APT was also an order of magnitude slower on SuSE than it ever was on Debian. I don't know why, probably it is the parsing of the RPM package database. In Debian, when I type "apt-get install xxx", it is installed in seconds.

Ubuntu

So I tried Ubuntu. The installation was easy. Too easy, almost - easier than SuSE. however, the system you got was also minimal - the default feature set was tailored for a standard desktop user. The nice thing is that you can install the system from a single CD. SuSE still needs at least three CDs to install the base system.

Ubuntu however did not ask for printers, TV cards, and the like during installation, like SuSE does. These things only get set up when you ask for them in the system settings, or when you first start or install the respective apps. I actually think that makes sense, this way the user isn't overwhelmed with hundreds of options before actually being able to use the system.

So, to summarize: Ubuntu

• asks for less stuff during installation (actually almost nothing),
• presents a default, clean GNOME desktop, good for new users but maybe a bit sparse for experienced users,
• includes system tools for almost, but not all, configuration tasks (SuSE YaST can configure LDAP access, folder sharing, SLP, NFS and some other stuff, Ubuntu can't by default),
• but the configuration tools that are there are enough for casual home use and are much easier to overview and understand for non-geeks.

In terms of packages, Ubuntu offers

• the best package management system in the world (Debian's),
• a much more stable software and pacakge management solution, with an easier to use frontend (yes, YaST loses here, definitely!),
• a good, stable, tested set of base packages (well SuSE has that too),
• just about everything else in the "Universe" and "Multiverse" collections,
• more and better updates to packages than SuSE,
• easy distribution upgrades from within a running system (no booting from CD like in SuSE needed!)
• a better and faster update and security fixes applet,
• graphical frontends for the most common tasks - eg. installing movie and MP3 plugins/codecs, popular non-included applications (like Google Earth) and other tools: Automatix

Speed

I said SuSE was slow. This refers mostly to system adminstration and installation/deinstallation of packages via YaST and the command line tools, they are slow. After using GNOME and KDE for some time under Ubuntu, I get the (subjective) impression that there isn't really that much difference in application speed. Firefox is mostly slow due to the fact that I have dozens of plugins installed.

Ubuntu boots faster and was the first distribution to use preloading during the boot process to speed it up. The next version of Ubuntu will include "Upstart" which will again shorten the boot process, starting services on demand only, instead of starting everything during boot time. Upstart is supposed to be a replacement for init, cron, at and all other tools that start and stop stuff based on events or time. If it is tested well, it could be a huge improvement. I sure hope they test it better than SuSE tested their package management - after all, these are critical system parts.

Microsoft

Novell recently signed an agreement with Microsoft so that Microsoft can sell SuSE Linux licenses to their customer. I think this is a potential huge advantage to Linux, and it is living proof that many people want Linux, also and especially "big businesses". As long as all licenses are respected (for example, the GPL), this is "just business" and not "evil" or anything. If anything, I'm worried about companies getting a bad Linux distribution with lots of bugs from Microsoft. On one hand, they might be used to getting that from MS ;), on the other hand, it could mean bad press for Linux.

And on the third hand, this could be exactly what Microsof has in mind. But that's maybe just food for the conspiracy theorists.