Re: Is this some new Microshill tactic?
OK - evidence then RE the difference between SUSE and Debian...
And remember - in production environments we may be looking after dozens of servers - so ease of use is exponentially important. You might have time to faff for days if you only have your one machine - take as long as you like. In a production environment we need to have servers fully set up, hardened, backed up, documented and production ready within hours.
Want to install Apache ITK - which is a brilliant version of Apache which runs vhosts as assigned users (usually the FTP account)
On SUSE - you're into recompiling Apache. OpenSUSE there is nothing in the repositories. There are a couple of iffy looking RPM's around - best of luck with that.
On Debian - apt-get install apache2-mpm-itk
Want to install etckeeper - a really useful, simple utility for keeping an eye on /etc
SUSE/SLES - not available in the repositories. And a really tricky tool to set up by yourself in a secure way.
Debian - apt-get install etckeeper
Enbling PHP 5.3
On SLES PHP5.3 is available in the repositories. However, if you use it then YAST gets broken because everytime you add a vhost and restart Apache the PHP module gets disabled. You have to MANUALLY add it back to 'APACHE_MODULES' in '/etc/sysconfig/apache2' and restart Apache.
On Debian apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5
Setting up an Apache vhost as default.
On SUSE/SLES if you set a vhost to be a default host Yast breaks the Apache setup in strange ways - the workaround we used was to set up a vhost on the address aaaaaaaa.xxx.xxx.xxx and set the doc root to /srv/www/htdocs.
On Debian you just set the ServerAlias.
Setting up xdebug.
On SUSE - you're back to recompiling source code.
On Debian - apt-get install php5-xdebug
Fail2ban
On SUSE you might be able to use an external repository and then set it up yourself.
On Debian - apt-get install fail2ban - and it is installed with sensible defaults.
PhpMyAdmin
On SUSE/SLES you need to download the source code, set up hosting space, install, setup etc etc.
All do-able - but if you have to do it on twelve machines before lunchtime well... good luck with that.
On Debian - apt-get install phpmyadmin.
I could go on - but I think you should have the picture by now.