A Few Details On Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

Quoting:more work on desktop environments, and a big emphasis on performance.

Maybe, just maybe, this means RHEL 6 will be a truly viable corporate desktop. It would be a big step forward.

So what makes one environment "viable" and another not?

Have you run a RHEL/CentOS desktop? It's slow and bloated with server related services that just aren't normally run on a desktop. Dealing with performance will help. The other big issue is the lack of an adequate variety of desktop apps in the repositories. Even with third party repos the selection is weak. Finally, hardware drivers are missing for a lot of desktop/laptop hardware.

@Caitlyn, I agree that too much is running by default, but with the tweaking of services and a judicial choice of installation packages in the first place, I have found RHEL and company to be a very capable, speedy and above all stable workstation OS.

I agree with the stable part. Speedy? That takes a ton of work, at least with RHEL 5.x. (4.x is another matter, but considering it's age I don't think that's what we're discussing.)

Ah, ok, you were speaking RHEL specifically, not more generally.

The few times I've worked with RedHat, I found it very usable especially from an administrative and "recovery" standpoint, but something about it just didn't work for me.

> Speedy? That takes a ton of work

I guess it comes down to administration. After some of the remarkable work I've seen people going through to make Windows a "viable" desktop, I know that the corporate world is perfectly willing to throw huge efforts behind their "desktops" if they think it will work.