Comment by lproven

Thanks for that response.

It's a balance. All of life is a balance.

I worked at Red Hat very briefly, and for SUSE for longer than ever before. Both were good workplaces with a good atmosphere: RH is one of the friendliest places ever, and I'm still friends with former colleagues from over a decade ago.

OTOH, installing Fedora 14 was like having a bucket of cold water to the face. I used and reviewed Red Hat Linux in the 1990s and it was a massive PITA. It had no automatic dependency resolution, so complex software installation (e.g. going from KDE 1.x to KDE 2.x) was a huge task involving manually installing hundreds of dependencies.

RH would not bundle KDE (because Qt was not 100% FOSS) -- which is also why Mandrake was founded -- and so the GUIs on RHL were poor.

I switched to SUSE. Good package management, good GUIs, good system-management tools. (YaST was way better than RH's inadequate `linuxconf`.)

RH "fixed" this by... removing Linuxconf.

Trying Fedora a decade later and it was just as bad. All the external bits improved because upstream improved. GNOME was still a mess. KDE had got much more bloated. Xfce was better than ever.

But the RH in-house bits, while having nice visual design, were functionally terrible. The installer was an embarassment.

Over a decade of work since I reviewed RHL 9 and it was worse than ever.

A few years later, go to work at SUSE, and hey, openSUSE was lovely. All the good bits still there and improved. Yeah, a bit bigger and slower and clunkier than Ubuntu.

But there's always a downside.

An older team so less party atmosphere. Fewer "team building" sessions in the pub.

And while I was away, SUSE switched from ReiserFS to Btrfs, and as usual, SUSE of old being fond of experimental bleeding-edge filesystems, it's half-implemented and doesn't work right.

Snapper doesn't prune snapshots thoroughly enough. It fills your disk and because of unimplemented or non-working features it can't tell when this will happen.

Official SUSE answer: give it lots of space. Here, our FS falls over unrepairably when full, so give it all your space so it won't fill up! And you can't repair it so take lots of backups!

Every distro has downsides. Every filesystem has downsides but they are much less obvious.

Btrfs made my openSUSE boxes collapse and crash 2-3 times a year for 4 years. That is intolerable. I put up with that kind of crashy junk in 1997 or so but not 20 years later.