Mandrake so much better than Redhat (my opinion)

[galt]

I tried Mandrake 8.1 6 months ago and it didnt work on my system. Random crashes, mouse wheel not supported, small annoyances and other things made me remove it less than a day after it was installed. Tried Redhat 7.2 and everything worked well. I upgraded to RH 7.3 a couple weeks ago, and everything was still well. Loved KDE 3. Except RH took 1.2 gigs of space installed. It had WAY TOO MUCH bloat. All these applications I never used. And sitting for ~1 hour trying to figure out what packages to install and which ones to keep without breaking dependancies and such got too annoying. Yesterday, I got it down to 900mb (KDE, Software Development packages, Utilities). It still installed Tatex and Latex and QuadTex and Texthis and TexThat and so much crap that I didnt need that I said 'forget it' and went and downloaded Mandrake 8.2

Oh what a difference. I thought RH was user friendly... Mandrake is even better. For ex: double click on a rpm file in Mandrake and you get a nice installation wizard that helps install/ show dependency problems etc. RH did some of this, but not enough. Biggest difference though: I now have a nice install with KDE and software development packages in under 500 megs. I love it. I also downloaded KDE3 packages yesterday, and once I get those installed, I dont think I'll ever install RH again.

I'm not saying RH is bad. I thoroughly loved RH 7.2. All I'm saying is that Drake 8.2 does what I need and in a beautiful 500 megs.

 

[lowtech1]

I don't know Mandrake very well since version 4 to 5. I found Suse 8.0 is much more workable than Redhat 6.0 to 7.1. But, found all distro premention are bloated specially the current over kill full-install with Gnome/KDE at 1 gig.

There are a few nice lightweight distro such as Debian 2.2 that can be optimizes (no GUI) for Database server at nice 43 megs install (got it to work with MySQL, DB2 v7.1, and Oracle 7i).

 

[spyordie007]

that's not entirely true that they are all bloated, both the RH and Mandrake installers will allow you to specify specific packages to be installed at the setup.

If you are using the default options I would agree however since they seem to think that everyone wants 1+ GB of packages for every install..

BTW I am running Mandrake 8.2, however have run other distro's as well. I tend to play around with differant builds from time to time..

-Spy

 

[SUOrangeman]

I recently had to give Mandrake the boot when I went dual CPU. I'm now a Debian man and loving it.

-SUO

 

[FUBAR]

It's all subjective really. I prefer RH's at home, no real reason, just easy and comes with most of what I want. Plus I started on it and i know where the dirs are supposed to be in it. The one mandrake I had (7.2something) thrashed the hard drive for about an hour straight after I installed it, so back to RH it was. The only problems I have had with RH was with a compaq server that you could not install with 2 net cards in, but I'll blame that on comcrap, and my off brand MB that thought it should use scsi mode for the cdrom. And most of my installs are under 700MB, before adding sources for stuff... talk about space hogs.

In some situations you may not have that much choice. For example, for modern SPARC distros, you basically have 1 version old of SuSE, and Debian, which seems to use much old stuff, or at least the kernel, that's about as much of a look as I give it. PPC you have a little bit more I believe.

Remember, when all else fails, recompile

 

[smp]

That's funny .. I just installed RH 7.2 and I like it more than mandrake .. heh

I'm still a big lamer though so what do I know?

 

[Chatterjee]

I sway back and forth all the time... Can't ever figure out which one to stay with; Gentoo, Red Hat, Mandrake. Mandrake 8.2 I prefer for a fast distro to get onto a computer. KDE packages are designed for Mandrake. The KDE folks do not like Red Hat so much though.

-S