im not an altcoin guy but im suddenly interested , as i can see on coinmarketcap there is ripple just after bitcoin then after it litecoin and ethereum , still isee a lotof people speaking about ethereum more then they do about ripple i just checked the website on ethereum and for some reasons i didn't understand anything , can't even find an executable file to download and if it's on beta will people lose their ether later (that's if they are storing them anywhere)
This comparison would be something like comparing an elephant with a whale. Two entirely different animal optimized for two entirely different living area

. Ripple is an IOU system for making different stuff (e.g.: elephant to BTC) easily swappable, while ETH is basically a framework for making contracts and then enforcing and verifying the processing of these contracts. As relaying between different systems is also possible, in the future it could be a framework for glueing together different platforms.
It's in alpha so there are no binaries like a ready to use QT wallet. You need to deploy it as it described here:
https://www.ethereum.org/cli.
Well said and the analogy makes sense. Different coin for different purposes.
But on the other hand, since ripple is centralized and banks love it, which is why it might survive and see some real world use quicker than eth.