difference between suse and red hat

[khilari]

hi guys i wanted to know the difference between suse and red hat with respect to any technical differences.
Thanks

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Lots of differences.

Suse and RH are based on the same kernel and nearly everything else is different. They share a lot of open source rpms.

Major general areas of difference:

Different command structure for start/stop daemons.

Different package maintenance schemes.

SEP

[TY 007]

Hello Khilari,

Red Hat Linux OS Technical Docs:
http://docs.hp.com/en/linuxredhat.html

SUSE Linux OS Technical Docs:
http://docs.hp.com/en/linuxsuse.html

Thanks

[dirk dierickx]

They are not really based on the same kernel, most of the time the version numbers don't match at all.

For me RH is more conservative, they mostly go for old-and-trusted versions, RH is in the view of OSS old.
SUSE tries to cram as much new stuff as possible in their distro. you'll find new development in there, most of the time RH considers it to be unstable, while they are already shipping it.

There is also difference in management tools, in suse you get yast while in RH you get a collection of separate tools.

RH is nr.1 in the market, still. and for some commercial products this means it is the only distro they support, there are few but they excist so always check that list of supported distros.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

No they are not based on the same kernel.

They both use kernels that Linus T. controls.

Which means to they are based on the same Core. Take a look at the current kernel versions. RH is based on 2.6.9 If these first three digits are the same, its pretty much the same kernel. RH is known to extensively patch the kernel.

Suse has a conservative enterprise version as well as a bleeding edge version like Fedora Core.

SEP

[Theodore Pardike]

I did an evaluation a couple of years ago (or more), so my information may be a little dated. But, I decided to go with SuSE for the following reasons:
1. LVM support (at that time Red Hat had minimal support for this).
2. YAST (Managing LVM through YAST is extremely easy).
3. Configuration files for applications in SuSE seem to provide a lot of examples.
It seemed to take me forever to figure out how to configure something in Red Hat. Search the web, test, do more searching on the web, test, etc.
Whereas in SuSE, there was generally enough examples in the configuration files to get me through (and YAST).

So, I would pretty much say, I went with SuSE for ease of administration.

Though, at this point, I would have to say that Novell's support leaves something to be desired (personal opinion).
Don't know about Red Hat's support.

Ted

[Maaz]

Enterprise versions from both sides are stable.
now a days I am working on SuSE(Desktops nd Server), and found that SuSE is atleast easier then redhat.. YAST is the single-window-operation for the whole System(SuSE)

as far as online help is concern, I do agree there are far much techies, and support available on rhl then on suse.

and one more drawback of suse is that if the power failure is common (2 or 3 times a day) chances of filesystem crashes are far much high ( to recover hav to boot system in rescue/maintenance mode and then run fsck to recover)... might be this is not the suse drawback, this might be the drawback of reiserfs(default fs in suse), but under the same power failure environment redhat doesnt crashes... again might be its not the feature of redhat .. might be its the feature of ext3(the default fs in redhat)

There might be some technical advantages of rhl Server, that keeps rhl Servers no 1, but as far as Desktop is concern I would say there is no equivalent of SuSE Enterprise Desktop 10 SP1(SLED 10 SP 1)

What I found is that if you want to ground MS Desktops, and want Linux Desktops inside, then there is no better alternative then SLED 10. Migration from MS Desktop to SLED 10, cause minimum overheads(training and support calls from end user).

Regards

[Maaz]

1, SUSE powers majority of the Linux powered Super Computers in the world.(document attached for reference)

2, SUSE is the only Linux endorsed and certified by SAP.
According to SAP's Pat Hume, SAP has chosen to work with Novell because it is the fastest growing enterprise-level
Linux vendor.
Source:
http://enterpriselinuxlog.blogs.techtarget.com/2008/03/17/novell-brainshare-2008-kick-off-partnerships-with-sap-platespin-suse-le-11/

3, Siemens switches from Unix to SUSE Linux to run critical SAP systems. Siemens' IT services arm will use SUSE Linux over Unix as the de facto operating system for running 350 business-critical SAP systems and 120,000 user accounts - along with numerous web applications, web servers and Oracle database servers. According to Siemens, the full migration to Linux will cut operating costs by 25 per cent compared to an equivalent Unix infrastructure.
Source: http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/04/01/230083/siemensswitches-from-unix-to-linux-to-run-critical-sap.htm

4, SUSE is the only Linux which can seamlessly integrate and virtualise on
Microsoft environment. www.moreinterop.com

5, SUSE is the only Enterprise Linux that supports and ships with almost all
major Linux File systems(ext3, reiserfs, XFS)

[Jeeshan]

you can check this link

http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives/2005/12/the_differences.html

[Maaz]

pdf attached.