Time to hang up Red Hat?

RedHat supports Gnome. They have one of the former kernel maintainers on salary. Be a bit careful hugging Novell prematurely their history is not so encouraging.

This used to be a mantra on /. "...the next MS!" - get serious! RedHat even if it wanted to be the next MS simply does not have the leverage to support such a position. Perhaps SCO had that dream, but NOT RedHat.

Consider the first requirement: wipe MS off the map!

Lots of people switching to that, too.

I'd love to see a blend of Mandrake and Debian, each has a lot to offer. But yes, SuSE's up there with the best of the best as well. (-:

Don't worry Mandrake still ranks number one on the charts http://www.distrowatch.com It's just that SUSE has more money to carry on with aggressive marketting and misleading hype. A significant share of people had terrible experiences with Suse (I included) - for the product itself and their customer support which is atrocious. I am no distro-camper .. and I like playing with many distros having a handful of favourites - but as far as the image of Linux goes to the general migrating public - Suse does more damage than good imho. This message was edited Oct 10, 2004 8:47 AM

I disagree completely about SuSE, but keep in mind I'm a desktop user and not a business. SuSE for the desktop user is wonderful IMHO. Since I don't deal with customer support, that hasn't been an issue. I also like trying different distros, and I do. I just keep coming back to SuSE. As for "misleading hype", I can't comment, since I haven't the foggiest idea what you're referring to there.

We don't have any (fickle) popularity charts, but our LUG's members use a lot of Debian, Mandrake and SuSE with a smattering of random others (Xandros, Red Hat, Knoppix etc).

distrowatch ranking is according to Hits Per Day to distrowatch pages. So, if more people are visiting Mandrake page in distrowatch.com, that does not mean that it is highly ranked upon other distros, as the measurement tool is not an accurate one, nor a reflection of the real spread and adoption of the distro.