Linux in Government: Linux Desktop Reviews, Part III

I feel like I have to add a postscript to this article.

When I first started using Linux, I never thought about using Red Hat for anything. I considered it a broken distribution. That was eight years ago.

As time went on and my company started marketing a replacement for Exchange Server, our demand came from Red Hat users. As I recall, 90% of our sales, trials, pilots and deployments required developing for Red Hat.

When Red Hat 8 became available, I started using it as a desktop. I liked the subscription model. I migrated to RH 9, used crossover office and got rid of everything Microsoft. Once I settled into using RH 9, I felt unhappy that the company announced the discontinuance of their retail product.

So, I shopped around. I settled on Sun's JDS. I liked the desktop rendering, look and feel, but I had to practically reengineer the product to get it to work for me. That's part of the reason you'll find around 200 RPMS at JDShelp.org.

The opportunity presented itself to do a review of Red Hat's desktop thanks to members of their desktop team. After doing interviews with members of the team, I understand why they price the product they way they do and how important their position has become.

That doesn't stop me from wanting to own it. It'd just rather spend the money on one of my other hobbies instead of paying the price as a single user. I also believe I can modify one of the Fedora distributions to give me the look and feel of the RHEL 4 desktop. As far as the RHEL internals and the Red Hat network, I can strive to create those.

Our server uses RHEL 3. I understand why our hosting company uses it. From their point of view, they have significant control over the thousands of servers they manage.

Does this take away from other Linux distributions - I don't believe it does. As one of the people with whom I spoke at Red Hat said, " many people don't understand Red Hat." Red Hat will never please everyone. But they give a polish to Linux and position it as a world class product. So, they get my respect.

The fact that Jonathan (Darl) Schwartz has chosen to go after Red Hat is a compliment. I feel like he's committing corporate suicide. Sun will takes years to catch up with Red Hat, if they ever do.

I just hope you like the article and give Red Hat a break. I don't believe they have forked Linux they way some people maintain - especially that spin doctor Schwartz.