linux as a workstation

[Mike Rambo]

Just my experience - YMMV. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with
Mandrake - in fact I like it and use versions 7.1 and 7.2 on both of my
workstations. But in my experience RedHat nearly always installs smaller
than Mandrake and I've read comments from Mandrake personell on the mandrake
list (most notably Civileme) that acknowledge that Mdk uses more bleeding
edge stuff and sometimes suffers for it (I've had a lot of problems with
Mdk8 - I have yet to get an install of version 8 and have kde work
afterward). Then again you have only to look at RedHat v7.0 and see the mess
with using a gcc snapshop to see anybody is vulnerable to that. Also, since
the machines I've deployed thus far have been on private networks I've not
had to deal with the security issues to the extent you have. My tune may
well change if I had needed to compare the RedHat vs Mandrake tools. In fact
some of those very tools are _why_ I prefer Mandrake on a workstation.
They're part of the "polish" advantage that Mandrake has over RedHat.

Mike R.


-----Original Message-----
From: Paul_Melson@keykertusa.com <Paul_Melson@keykertusa.com>
To: Mike Rambo <mrambo@lsd.k12.mi.us>
Cc: Linux-User (E-mail) <linux-user@egr.msu.edu>;
linux-user-admin@egr.msu.edu <linux-user-admin@egr.msu.edu>; Scott Overfield
<soverfield@GCCMHA.org>
Date: Thursday, August 16, 2001 2:30 PM
Subject: Re: linux as a workstation


>>My second thought was to suggest that you look at Mandrake for
>workstation
>>use. It is built on RedHat and as such does bear resemblence in file
>>structure etc. Mandrake appears to me better in providing the bells and
>>whistles that most windows folks will look for in a desktop station. For
>one
>>thing it has a pretty wide variety of apps that come loaded out of the
>box.
>>But mostly I like it for a desktop workstation because of the smaller
>>touches they've built into it - slicker appearance etc. I still like
>RedHat
>>for servers because it is more stable and robust than Mandrake. Mandrake
>>tends to built more on the bleeding edge - occasionally there are
>>consequences to that approach.
>
>Really?  I just deployed some bare-bones Mandrake boxes and have been very
>happy with them thus far.  I mean, Linux is Linux, so if you're not
>running a lot of 3rd party apps, most distributions will perform about the
>same.  But it took me half the time to harden those systems as it would've
>with another distribution.  Mandrake's install made it easy to lock things
>down, disable daemons, and install to ReiserFS, so all I had to do was go
>back and essentially enable the short list of features I wanted the
>machine to have.  It was nice.
>
>Not to say that Mandrake wouldn't make a good workstation OS.  It's great,
>I'm sure.
>
>PaulM
>