Red Hat or Mandrake?

[MCS]

I installed Redhat a few years ago but gave up on it (I think I only had one PC back then). These days I have several and I will soon have a completely spare machine which I thought I might as well do something with...its a K6-2 400Mhz with a 4.3GB HD and probably something like a Riva128 or a TNT-1 graphics card, whatever I have lying around

I have downloaded the ISOs for Redhat 7.2 and also for Mandrake 8.1 - I hear they are both good distributions for beginners but which one should I install and why?

Thanks

 

[Techwhore]

I use both RH 7.1 and Mandrake 8.1. Essentially they're the same, but mandrake really impressed me when i originally installed it (version 7.1). Mandrake offers Drakconf which is kinda of the equivilant of control panel in windows, so it's easy to perform tasks you otherwise wouldn't know how to do.

I haven't used red hat with a gui since version 6.1 so i can't say how easy it is now or if it's better. I don't think you can go wrong with either distro.

 

[Priit]

I prefer Redhat but people seem to recommend Madrake for beginners over that...

 

[Louie1961a]

It depends on whether or not you want to use Gnome or KDE. Red Hat probably has a more polished implementation of Gnome, and it's KDE isn't so bad either. Mandrake is more KDE centric. My only beef with Red Hat is that they tend to stick some files in unusual places. So, for instance, when I tried to install evolution 1.0 from tar ball sources, it kep telling me gnome print was not installed and needed to be installed before evolution could be installed. However, gnome print was installed. There probably was an easy fix for that, but I have never had that problem with Suse, so I stuck with Suse (my favorite). You have to pay for Suse however, and you can get red hat and mandrake free. I would suggest you try them both. Once you get the partitioning done, it is very easy to install either package. For instance once you have done all the up front work and installed say red hat, if you later choose to install mandrake, dpending on how fast your machine is, it is probably a 1/2 hour operation at most

 

[Southerner]

Had Mandrake 8.1 on my primary PC (laptop) until I separated from my employer and gave the laptop back.

Installed RedHat 7.2 on the machine I'm currently using, and am more impressed with it. Seems like it's a more cohesive package -- under Mandrake Abiword would crash whenever I tried to use it (oh, you want boldface? *blammo*), but on the RH box it churns away happily.

Not that I was unhappy with Mandrake at all -- I just think more thought has gone into RedHat's choices for what to include in the distribution, and it shows.

Mandrake update was nice, but up2date seems a little cleaner (and free for the first machine you use it on). Note that I'm a KDE user (gotta love KMail's GPG support), rather than a Gnome user -- can't comment on Gnome.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Do a search here in the OS forum, the "which distro is the best" question has been discussed plenty (since it can never be answered (unless you say Slackware or Debian )).

 

[MCS]

<< it can never be answered >>



I thought this might be the case, but I have at least narrowed it down to two of them. No harm in trying both I suppose. I will probably go for Red Hat to start with.

Thanks all.

 

[MGMorden]

I'd say Redhat. It's GUI enough to keep you from quiting but still Unix enough that you'll learn . . . Unix (how to use it. I'm well aware that Linux isn't a true Unix underneath). Of course I still like Slackware myself though. It seems to have lost it's momentum though (I don't think they'll last till their next version), so I'm soon going to be seriously looking at Debian.