openSUSE vs. Ubuntu for .Net Developers
I know that everyone has there own opinion on this and that most blogs will give a comparison of the two and at the end will leave the reader to decide. I would have to agree that choosing your flavor of Linux depends upon what you want to do and your back ground. If you are a .Net developer you should switch from Ubuntu to openSUSE. Why you might ask??
If you want to leverage your existing .Net development skills on Linux then you are going to want to use openSUSE. Both Ubuntu and openSUSE are well supported. Ubuntu is more widely used and so you will find more tutorials for Ubuntu but openSUSE has more official tutorials on their site as opposed to blog entries which can also be very helpful.
What sets openSUSE apart is the fact that Mono the .Net runtime for Linux is created by the same guys (Novell) that create openSUSE. So if you want the latest greatest mono and you want to get MonoDevelop up and running so that you can write C# code on a Linux machine openSUSE is the way to go. Also as an added bonus openSUSE has a lot more gui admin tools for say your firewall so if you are used to Windows switching over to openSUSE is a bit easier from the admin side.
RT @migueldeicaza: Finally a programming language for libertarians and Tea Party enthusiasts:
4 Comments
Sean said
The information here is slightly misleading. While I have nothing, in particular, against OpenSUSE, most people will probably prefer Ubuntu. Also, the Ubuntu folks are pretty good about having updates posted pretty regularly. If you have to wait for a mono release, it typically won't be long.
runxc1 said
If you look at the official Ubuntu packages (which are inhereted from Debian) you will see that intrepid is still using 1.91 and jaunty 2.01 where as 2.2 was release months ago and 2.4 has the new secret sauce which allows me to run a compiled ASP.Net web app.
Also just as a note this website is ASP.Net running on Mono 2.2(I plan on updating one of these weekends to 2.4 once I back up the virtual machine it is running on). I first tried to set it up using Ubuntu and couldn't get all of the Mono goodness so I switched to OpenSuse which is well documented.
See below for Ubuntu package details
http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?suite=intrepid&searchon=names&keywords=mono
http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?suite=jaunty&searchon=names&keywords=mono
Paco said
I used ubuntu in the past, but I dropped it because it was too conservative for my personal way of working. I like to work with the newest from the newest. Only 5% of the ubuntu users is developer. Other distributions are more targeted on developers. Personally I use Fedora now, with mono from svn. Ubuntu feels like it was a year ago (no asp.net mvc support, limited linq, etc.) Mono will work out of the box the best on Suse, because both are sponsored by novell.
I recommend all mono developers to use the svn version.
Rob Oakes said
As you note, Ubuntu lags a little bit on the release of Mono. But there are a lot of other reasons to use Ubuntu. First, due to its large user base, it tends to have larger repositories than OpenSuSE. While I started off with Novell's distribution, and it will always have a place in my heart, package installation can be a tremendous pain. However, on Ubuntu, it's tremendously easy to get up and running very quickly because of the size of said repositories.
Moreover, outside of Mono, there are very utilities where I don't need the to have absolute bleeding edge. As a result, I find that it's much easier to just compile it from source out of the Mono svn. I then run it in a parallel environment from my system Mono. While this situation might not be ideal for all users, I find that it works for me very well.
One last point. While Ubuntu may lag in comparison to OpenSuSE, the lag is fairly limited. The upcoming 9.10 release will feature Mono 2.4, bringing it to the same version in OpenSuSE. (The benefit of regular 6 month releases.)