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Comment by BossingAround | Hacker News Reader

What's the differentiator from the Fedora/Centos/RHEL line?

For me: yast (easy to use GUI/TUI for many administration tasks — useful for less experienced admins), snapper (filesystem snapshot management tool which automatically creates them before and after package management operations and allows you to boot into them or roll back if anything goes wrong. Quite similar to FreeBSD boot environments.)

zypper is probably the best 'classic' package manager there is (although dnf is great too; it's more of an argument against Debian and its derivatives).

Then there is https://build.openbuildservice.org which automatically builds packages for all supported distributions and architectures from a single RPM spec file and creates a ready to use repository for you.

OpenSUSE Leap is built from SLES sources and is thus comparable in its stability guarantees to the old CentOS (or any of the current RHEL rebuilds).

I found YaST to get in my way at times; I particularly remember YaST's Network panel hanging because I had StevenBlack's huge HOSTS file. I do like the network panel though for changing static IPs; I had to do some searching to try to figure out how to do that on Fedora, and ended up using Cockpit instead (not sure how to do it cli).

I'm confused on the differences in repo priority between zypper (oS TW) and dnf (Fedora). Apparently dnf also allows setting repo priority, but I've never had to do it, and packages seem to come from expected repos without having to specify (stuff comes from RPM Fusion if I have those repos added). On TW I had to manually specify repo priority to something other than 99 and set a flag to allow vendor changes to have similar behavior; I like that kind of control but I didn't need to do it on Fedora.

OBS is nice in-concept but I don't like the idea of using it outside of openSUSE. I think Launchpad/PPAs for Ubuntu, Copr for Fedora, and AUR for Arch. I think OBS for openSUSE and don't like the idea of using OBS for other distros, even if that's one of the big benefits and point to OBS.

You can use OpenSuse without YaST, that's what I do myself.

As far as open build service, Fedora has https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/

Probably YAST¹ and the Open Build Service². I think the latter is especially great. There's a public instance of it hosted by openSUSE³, and you can use it to build packages for almost any distro and get a feel for it.

1: https://yast.opensuse.org/documentation

2: https://openbuildservice.org/

3: https://build.opensuse.org/

As far as open build service, Fedora has https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/

You seem keen to promote this, as you posted the same reply twice.

It's not the same thing at all, or even very comparable, AFAICS.

Your site produces a Fedora COPR. One of the people on the COPR team spent 10 min trying to explain to me what COPR meant at a Flock conference a few years ago. The actual answer is:

"It's a PPA but for Fedora instead of Ubuntu."

SUSE OBS does not build repos and it does not build openSUSE packages. I am running native Debian packages on Ubuntu right now built on OBS (Waterfox, notably.)

OSB builds anything for any OS. It's basically a free public CI/CD server, and it's platform-neutral.

I have not checked but I believe it can also build Windows and macOS binaries as well.

> You seem keen to promote this, as you posted the same reply twice.

The same point has been made twice, so the response is identical..?

> "It's a PPA but for Fedora instead of Ubuntu."

So I'm not sure the analogy holds 100%.

I, as a software developer, want to distribute my SW. I use COPR to build RPMs that run on any RPM-based distro, e.g. openSUSE, Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, ...

You, as the consumer, can enable the COPR repository and consume my packages (or you can manually download the RPMs if you prefer).

> OSB builds anything for any OS. It's basically a free public CI/CD server, and it's platform-neutral.

That is indeed different. Thank you, I might take a look at OSB.

:-)

AppArmor vs SELinux

I've ran Ubuntu and openSUSE servers and aside from a profile issue with PHP and openSUSE, I don't know if AppArmor is even protecting anything. Everything just works and it makes me think AppArmor is only applied to specific apps/services and not globally.

SELinux (at least on Fedora) is present, everywhere, and will gladly let you know if something is blocked because of it. I prefer this kind of protection even if it's more annoying at times :p Just a few weeks ago I learned about bin_t and that made my SELinux config for that service a lot more simple.

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