Mandrake 9.1 or Redhat 9? Who's tried 'em both?

[Gooberlx2]

Has anyone tried both of these OSes and able to comment on them? I noticed that RH9 is i386+ whereas Mandrake is i586+. Have you noticed greater performance in Mandrake over RH? Should I expect greater performance?

I've used both but not on comparable hardware, so I can't really comment much on performance. What I have noticed from both distros is the installation, user setup, GUI, tweaking, etc. was pretty much flawless. I'm still a bigger fan of apt4rpm over urpmi. Mandrake atleast includes xmms-mp3 and xine still, whereas RH only does xmms-ogg and no xine (no big deal).


Anyone have more to add?

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

I don't know what urpmi is like but apt4rpm ain't that great. There's not that many packages (or are there great package repositories that I didn't find?). I didn't think redhat was that bad but if you plan on doing _anything_ regarding installing new software, unless it's a trivial little program, expect a PITA. I'd say just skip all that BS and install debian or gentoo.

debian

So it looks just as good, you have alot more software at your disposal, what's the downside? Installation perhaps, but a so-so installation is well worth not having to deal with redhat BS. Also, what's up with RHN? You have to pay money for updates? No thanks.

 

[Gooberlx2]

Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey
I don't know what urpmi is like but apt4rpm ain't that great. There's not that many packages (or are there great package repositories that I didn't find?). I didn't think redhat was that bad but if you plan on doing _anything_ regarding installing new software, unless it's a trivial little program, expect a PITA. I'd say just skip all that BS and install debian or gentoo.

debian

So it looks just as good, you have alot more software at your disposal, what's the downside? Installation perhaps, but a so-so installation is well worth not having to deal with redhat BS. Also, what's up with RHN? You have to pay money for updates? No thanks.

Yeah, I noticed that too. Fubar!

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Yeah I'm honestly not trying to be troll-ish about it, I understand that all distros have ups and downs, but I seriously don't see the upside to redhat - other than appeasing corporate bigwigs. Something like debian or gentoo will take a little longer to get good with, but after a month or two, you'll be pretty self-sufficient and much more able to do what you want with your computer than you would be with redhat ( **IMO** of course ). Redhat just gobs on piles of useless software and makes it hard to deal with software. PITA. Again, I'm not trying to be bitchy, this is just a little venting from my own annoying experiences.

 

[BmXStuD]

i ttyed mandrake 9.1 and lastnight i dl rh9 but havent put on my pc yet b/c im a windows boy! ;0

 

[LuckyTaxi]

I had problems with mandrake 9.1 right off the bat. I'm downloading rh 9 as we speak so i should be able to play with that.

I need a nice distro for a couple of PCs at work for the kids. I might either try RH 9 or Suse 8.1

 

[lowtech1]

Originally posted by: lilcam
I had problems with mandrake 9.1 right off the bat. I'm downloading rh 9 as we speak so i should be able to play with that.

I need a nice distro for a couple of PCs at work for the kids. I might either try RH 9 or Suse 8.1

I'll come back in 45 min & let you know.

 

[lowtech1]

I haven't have much time to play around with RedHat 9.0, but it is much nicer than RH 8.0.

The install process has been refine compare to 8.0 and the hardware detection is excelent that is slightly better than Mandrake 9.1.

"Add/Remove Application" format is the same as RH8.0, but is lightly improve for readability. As for eyes candy it is nice but is not as nice as Mandrake 9.1 or WinXP.

Printer management is much improved over RH8.0 and on par with Mandrake 9.1.

Also the newer Mozilla version 1.2.1 is a much improvement over of the crapy almost un usable RH8.0 Mozilla 1.0.1. Mozilla 1.2.1 on RH9.0 seemed to be functioning just as nicely as Mozilla 1.3 on Mandrak 9.0.

I haven't done any speed test, but applications on RH9.0 seemed to run slightly faster than Mandrake 9.0, and is much faster than RH8.0.

RH9.0 desktop layout now is much cleaner & more logical than RH8.0 and it is on par with Mandrake 9.0.

IMHO, Mandrake 9.0 stand alone desktop is the more logical route for a home computer or a person that is use to WindowsXP or MacOS due to the teletubies eyes candy desktop, and RH 9.0 seemed to be better as a workstation due to the slight cleaner not as much frill look.

Personally I find Knoppix 3.2 still is better than both of the above distro, because of its tie to Debian & you could run from CD or install various version Morphix which is a much tighter ofspring of Knoppix. And, the eyes candy of Knoppix with KDE 3.1.1 is on par with RH9.0 & Mandrake 9.0.

 

[Gooberlx2]

Yeah, I like knoppix too. Maybe I'll try Morphix, since knoppix has a bunch of stuff I'll never use (and makes the menus look disorderly IMO).

I'm not new to linux by any means. I guess the way in which I ask the question did imply so. I've done gentoo, and loved it, but It's too much of a PITA to compile packages for me because:
1) Not enough HDD space for large apps
2) I tinker with different apps too much, installing/uninstalling all over the place. Compile time just ends up taking too long.

I probably ought to just do an unstable debian install (or Knoppix/Morphix )

Thanks for the replies.

 

[Shamrock]

does RH 9 have Audigy 2 support? Becoz I tried the ALSA drivers and they didnt work with my RH 8 install :\

 

[lowtech1]

I too have terrible sound from almost all distros on my i810 sound card, but all distros seemed to work fine on soundblaster 64/128.

RedHat harware hlc sound list: Creative Labs

 

[Gooberlx2]

Just in case anyone was curious:

I did eventually install RH9 and Mandrake9.1 on the same machine, and Mandrake9.1 seemed to edge out RH9 in performance for me, and by a decent amount. Maybe because it's compiled for a faster architecture (i586 vs. i386)? That would seem to make sense to me. I didn't do any real benchmarks, I just used the OSes as I normally would and judged the response times, etc.

Of course, it still doesn't beat out Gentoo's performance and urpmi isn't as good as Debian's apt or Gentoo's portage (but is perfectly usable once your sources are configured. Go here ).

-cheers