On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 12:11 AM, Yasha Karant <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> This is perhaps a silly question, but I would appreciate a URL or some other
> explanation.
>
> A faculty colleague and I were discussing the differences between a
> supported enterprise Linux and any of a number of "beta" or "enthusiast"
> linuxes (including TUV Fedora).  A question arose for which I have no
> answer:  why did SL -- that has professional paid personnel at Fermilab and
> CERN -- select to use the present TUV instead of SuSE enterprise that is RPM
> (but yast, not yum) based, and has to release full source (not
> binaries/directly useable) for the OS environment under the same conditions
> as TUV of SL?  SuSE is just as stable, but typically incorporates more
> current versions of applications and libraries than does the TUV chosen.
> Any insight would be appreciated.  If SuSE had been chosen (SuSE originally
> was from the EU and thus a more natural choice for CERN), what would we be
> losing over SL?
> To the best of my knowledge, there is no SuSE Enterprise clone equivalent to
> the SL or CentOS clones of TUV EL.
>
> Yasha Karant

These tend to go on, so keep it very short.

YaST is not my friend: it was very poor, and dangerous to use, when I
used it with SuSE 9.x and I've not heard of it getting better. Neither
is SuSE's practice of bundling the patch files for SRPM's into
tarballs, which have individual patches activated or not iin a yes/no
fashion in the .spec file. This makes editing and source controlling
htem very painful. And the licensing agreements between Novell (the
owners of SuSE) and Microsoft are very dangerous, and provide no
patent coverage for free or open source repackagers.

I could go on, but that's plenty.