Costas writes:
>
>I am trying to decide which Distro to use. I want to decide between Suse and Mandrake. It seems they both are
> complete packages.

> Does anyone have any experience with either one? Also I think I will also use KDE because it is more stable than
> Gnome QT has gone free as well

It's wonderful to have choices in distros. I would hope that RedHat or anyone becomes the overwhelmingly
dominant distro! However, there are some definite reasons for choosing one distro over another.

It helps to know what each distro is designed for.

For example, Mandrake's original reason for being was to take the RedHat distribution and
include binaries which were made for i686 instead of 386's, which theoretically should increase
performance. However, if you don't have a Pentium II or greater then you wouldn't want Mandrake necessarily.
Mandrake has since evolved to be more than simply a RedHat re-package.

So much depends on what you are trying to accomplish.

SuSe is the dominant distro in Europe, but RedHat is the dominant commercial distro in the US.
Slackware has been around the longest (but you don't want to run Slackware anymore unless you
actually enjoy pain! ;-) Debian is strongly accepted by the Linux purists. RedHat's most prominent
feature is it's package installer, rpm.

Unless you specify more of what you are looking for in a distro, you really can't say much about which
we might recommend.

I personally run RedHat and support RedHat because it's the most commonly installed distro at Duke Univ.
The Debian guys support themselves, but it seems that we get a lot more RedHat newbies that need help
and that's my job. However, rpm is really nice compared to having to worry about tarballs.

I produce linux routers and servers. I build them with vanilla RedHat. Why? Because if a security advisory
comes out for RedHat, it is usually patched and available within hours, which is stronger than Mandrake, IMHO.
I can't say much about SuSe, but it's probably a reasonable choice for updates.

What kind of support is available for SuSe and Mandrake. Are you looking for support, or are you just
looking to play?