Ubuntu seems like it’s the latest and greatest in the world of Linux distros, but it just didn’t measure up to openSUSE during my install fest last night. I run openSUSE at work so I figured I would get some variety at home by using Ubuntu on my personal file server. I tried installing Ubuntu 8.04 server twice and finally gave up. My gripes:
- Don’t ask me questions throughout the installation – ask them all up front and then just do it.
- No, I don’t want to set a special password for MySQL. I don’t want to do it now, nor the subsequent three times you prompt me at various points during the installation.
- Freezing the system halfway through installation of GRUB is a dealbreaker, namely because I can’t complete the install.
So with some relief I dropped in my openSUSE disc and the install blew through like a breeze. Surely my comfort level with openSUSE helps, but the SuSE brand has been around a long time; it includes all those little fixes and exception handling that are a part of mature software.
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The SuSE distros are pretty solid in my experience. Years ago they had better quality control/testing/etc than redhat. I would suspect that they still have better QC than Ubuntu. Also, SuSE Linux Enterprise Linux has been around awhile so they have tested lots of hardware and software.
That being said, my current home server is CentOS and I think my next one will be Nexenta.