How similar is Ubuntu to SUSE Enterprise
I have a question for SysAdmins who know many flavors of Linux. I need to be familiar with SUSE Enterprise for a job, but I currently have no access to the enterprise edition. I also would prefer to learn Ubuntu. So how similar is ubuntu to SUSE Enterprise in terms of the commands, etc.
Solution 1:
As it happens I'm currently going the other direction, coming from a SLES-based office to an Ubuntu one.
The difference is quite significant and they do not share much in the way of distro-level commands. The commands that differ:
- Service start/stop/management
- Runlevel editing
- Package management
- Config-file management (though the "just directly modify files" methods work on both)
- sudo/su config differs
- Network configuration
In short, nearly everything is different. I'm still learning how to do things the Ubuntu way and it has been several months. The linguistic analogy is the difference between German and English.
If you need access now, I suggest downloading the latest OpenSUSE release as that's what SLES is based on. The newer OpenSUSE releases do differ from the SLES version in some interesting ways, but how you interact with the overall system doesn't change a lot. Again with the linguistic analogy, this is US English vs UK English; it's a different dialect but still intelligible.
Solution 2:
Why not download OpenSUSE and give that a try? It's the free community "development" edition of SUSE Enterprise, similar to how Fedora and RedHat work together.