DEBIAN
Originally started as the Free Software foundation's (FSF) official distribution of Linux, the Debian project has since broken off from the FSF and become an independent entity. Debian still has strong ties with the FSF, and its member are among the most diligent at protecting Open Source software.
Instead od RPM, Debian uses a package management system known as dpkg. The general idea behind dpkg is similar to that of RPM, but some extra features enhance dependency checking for package installation and removal, and some other features offer convenient package updating mechanisms.
dpkg is perhaps the most powerful packaging tool available for Linux. It is not always the most convenient, however, because it tends to ask many technical questions during installation. This is confusing for new users and annoying for advance users. It means you can't just leave an install of Debian running and expect it to be complete when you come back because it stops installing every time it comes to a configuration question.
Recent changes to dpkg and its front-end, dselect, should greatly improve this. All configuration question are being moved to after the installation. Questions are also now ranked by their importance, meaning that a novice user can automatically accept defaults for all but the most critical question.
In addition to running on Intel x86 and Pentium platforms, Debian has been ported to otherbsystems such as Sun's SPARC machines and StrongArm (currently used in systems such as Corel's NetWinder machines). There is also a port to the Alpha and the Mac 68k available.
This distribution is highly regarded as being one of the most stable and technically sound distributions of Linux. Unfortunately, it is also regarded as being one of the most unfriendly distributions for new Linux users from a usability and installability standpoint. This is understandable because technical quality was the main focus of the development team when the system was pieced together. Because of the level of technical Linux savvy required to install and use this distribution, Debian is aimed at experienced Linux users and developers.
Much like OpenLinux, Red Hat, and SuSE, fee-based technical support is available for Debian, but only in the form of corporate support contracts (the others offer lower priced end-user support as well as corporate support contracts). Free support, as usual (and as applicable to all the available Linux distribution), is available on the Internet through mail lists and newsgroups.
SuSE
SuSE has proven to be quite popular in Europe and is enjoying growing success in the United States. It uses a SysV intialization scheme, which makes it act much like distributions such as Red Hat and OpenLinux. It also uses RPM as its package management mechanism. Most of the administration centers on a utility called YaST2 (Yet Another Setup Tool), which handles package maintenance and upgrades, user administration, and a number of other essential administration tasks.
The main difference between OpenLinux and SuSE (and other distributions for that matter) is that SuSE strives to be more voluminous, meaning that it tends to carry more packages than most others distributions (over twice as many as OpenLinux for example). This is an advantage and a drawback. The advantage is that everything you might ever want is likely to be there. The drawback is that it is difficult to test and integrate so many packages. So many packages can also be extremely confusing to new users.
Like other distributions mentioned before, SuSE include a graphical installation system and uses KDE as its default graphic environment. As Linux has spread to more and more users, ease of use has steadily become a core part of many distributions.
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