NethServer vs ClearOS

NethServer and ClearOS are very similar in many ways. each has its own ethos and a slightly different focus and its own implementation on doing basically the same job - it really depends on 3 things: (1) What you are trying to achieve, and (2) how good is the community/paid support behind it and, (3) which distro you feel most comfortable with.

I have been a ClearOS Community User since 5.1 was released and the community support has been very good. Please bear in mind that they have dramatically changed the administrative layout for the ClearOS admin control panel as well as their forum and tried to make the 2 interfaces to look, behave a feel similar for consistency reasons. Unfortunately the external outsource company who has done the website and forum has failed miserably (to put it politely) in the eyes of the community (especially the longer-termers and those most involved) and I know that the ClearOS Management Team are working to get that resolved.
The ClearOS Management Team really did bite off more than they could chew when they changed the look and layout for the forum. Yes the forum needed a facelift as it was looking long in the tooth, however the transition and implementation for the new forum could have been better managed and better tested before deployment.

For the NethServer, the forums are also a good strong point. Some of the aspects which I wish the ClearOS forums could have is the warm welcome given to the new members and the encouragement given to get involved from the get go, as well as the strong collaboration between the Devs and the community as this seems to be stronger in the NethServer community compared to the ClearOS community.

These are my first and off-the-cuff impressions between the 2 distributions.

5 Likes

I totally agree with you.
I saw that their forum is based on Joomla :shock:
I love Joomla, I have few sites with this plateform, but a forum on Joomla is crazy.
Even navigate on the forum is not a plaesure.

Thanks for your kind words, just a few thoughts:

  • my big aim is that everyone would become a NethServer dev, contributor, tester, bug hunter, support specialist, wiki editor, evangelist, shaker or whatever. No barriers, huge cooperation and increasing commitment (and fun!)
  • warm welcomes and a friendly environment are made by people :slight_smile: just human factor here as @walter_schoenly said recently
  • a good forum platform helps discussions and makes people involved.

I didn’t know very well clearos, thanks for your explanation

2 Likes

Well, i must say, this community is clearly one big difference to clearos/ipfire/smoothwall/forefront tmg/ipcop

So, clearos is REALLY user friendly, that makes him “fragile” i think… some of my servers crashed for “nothing” i must say, entered in “panic mode”, logs on the GUI are bad for diagnostics, but thats ok, i think the “customization” of some apps are poor in options

ClearOS is far from beeing lightweight… like ipfire with proxy filtering… lol, i have some issues with highswap usage. I really don´t know how NethServer will behave, it is hosted on a Xeon/8GB server :wink: my hopes are for the best…

I do miss a little the PPTP Vpn :stuck_out_tongue: aldo i like the openvpn really much too, but i currently have some issues with that.

HTTPS filtering is non-existent or really bad implemented (clear os) on IpFire is nonexistent.

I had a recent past experience in ForeFront TMG 2010 (M$) and it is also very good. Some issues with high memory usage too, even on a Bi-Xeon with 16GB :slight_smile:

For now that is all i can remember, i have not more than 6 months experience with those new linux firewall :wink: In the past (more than 10 years ago) i used to work only in command line with iptables/slackware linux.

Thanks for this man, we try to do the best as we can.

Oh, i just remmembered something really pleases me in ClearOS, they have a DDNS… but thats no harm with ddclient in NEthServer :stuck_out_tongue: