CougTek
Hairy Aussie
I downloaded and install this thing this evening. I was sure it would be inferior to Mandrake 9.1 RC1, since most of the packages weren't as up-to-date as in the blue Linux distro. I've not been using it for very long, but I can say that so far, I've not been disapointed.
First, fonts are way better than in Mandrake. Everything is a bit more readable and easier on the eyes. The way the RedHat team arranged Gnome makes it just as usable as KDE is on other distros I've tried. A high feast in itself. RedHat also put more attention to details like desktop icons than the Mandrake folks did. The overall feeling, once you're in the OS, is that you are on a more mature platform than on Mandrake 9.1.
Everything isn't all pinky though. I prefer the OS installer of Mandrake to RedHat's Anaconda. Just a personal preference perhaps, but I felt I had more control on the stuff I installed when I first configured Mandrake than when I installed RedHat.
RedHat is also slower to boot than Mandrake. Significantly slower on the Athlon 500MHz on which I tried both. Another thing I find pretty stupid on RedHat is that they designate every Windows partitions as "DOS". There isn't much DOS on a NTFS partition with Win 2K SP3 installed on it. It feels like they keep this wording on purpose, which is pretty lame IMO. Call things as they are.
On Mandrake, many of the bundled applications are still in beta versions. Even the kernel is. On RedHat, it's the contrary. Instead of Mozilla 1.3b, you get 1.2.1. Instead of Kernel 2.4.21-pre4, you get 2.4.20. I haven't checked everything, but it seems that while Mandrake took the adventurous road, RedHat went for safety. Looking at the history of both distros, it isn't all that surprising. RedHat wants to project an image of itself as an OS for serious stuff. They target servers and workstations. Mandrake is more a desktop OS for Linux enthousiast.
Note to our F@h members, the linux client crashes due to a segmentation fault on Phoebe (code name for RedHat 8.1) just like it does on Mandrake 9.1 RC1. Beware.
First, fonts are way better than in Mandrake. Everything is a bit more readable and easier on the eyes. The way the RedHat team arranged Gnome makes it just as usable as KDE is on other distros I've tried. A high feast in itself. RedHat also put more attention to details like desktop icons than the Mandrake folks did. The overall feeling, once you're in the OS, is that you are on a more mature platform than on Mandrake 9.1.
Everything isn't all pinky though. I prefer the OS installer of Mandrake to RedHat's Anaconda. Just a personal preference perhaps, but I felt I had more control on the stuff I installed when I first configured Mandrake than when I installed RedHat.
RedHat is also slower to boot than Mandrake. Significantly slower on the Athlon 500MHz on which I tried both. Another thing I find pretty stupid on RedHat is that they designate every Windows partitions as "DOS". There isn't much DOS on a NTFS partition with Win 2K SP3 installed on it. It feels like they keep this wording on purpose, which is pretty lame IMO. Call things as they are.
On Mandrake, many of the bundled applications are still in beta versions. Even the kernel is. On RedHat, it's the contrary. Instead of Mozilla 1.3b, you get 1.2.1. Instead of Kernel 2.4.21-pre4, you get 2.4.20. I haven't checked everything, but it seems that while Mandrake took the adventurous road, RedHat went for safety. Looking at the history of both distros, it isn't all that surprising. RedHat wants to project an image of itself as an OS for serious stuff. They target servers and workstations. Mandrake is more a desktop OS for Linux enthousiast.
Note to our F@h members, the linux client crashes due to a segmentation fault on Phoebe (code name for RedHat 8.1) just like it does on Mandrake 9.1 RC1. Beware.