Red Hat's Loss Is Ubuntu Linux's Gain

Ubuntu targets the home user, Red Hat goes for the enterprise desktop. They're very different. Ubuntu has zero enterprise deployment and management tools, Red Hat doesn't care if your bling works. But then, these silly Foo vs. Blah articles rarely bother with useful information anyway.

Well, TC, just to bother you with a useful question (at least I hope), to keep things interesting for you:

Would there be a market for Ubuntu with enterprise deployment and management tools in your opinion? Because Fedora seems to be an indication there is a market for RHEL with bling.

I really don't understand what's so hard about this. RHEL can already be installed as a desktop system. What does the new Red Hat product offer besides preinstalled codecs for multimedia?

If Ubuntu can make it so the user can pick and choose which proprietary codecs and drivers he or she wishes to install, can't Red Hat just look at the code, figure out how Ubuntu/Linspire/Pioneer/what-have-you does it and do that themselves?

As much as I try to promote Linux on the desktop, I think it will happen in the enterprise before it does in the home -- and for office workers, all those codecs don't matter anyway.

But if a generation of people comes of age and associates "Linux" with "Ubuntu," that's a heap of trouble for Red Hat. Or maybe not. What the hell do I know?

It seems I was wrong, Hans, Red Hat does want your bling to work: http://www.redhat.com/rhel/desktop/details/

And wireless, and peripherals, and even connect to *retch* MS Exchange. And smart card authentication. Plus all the enterprisey central-management stuff. I imagine that Ubuntu would do fine in the enterprise if it did the same thing. All those things are available for any Linux, they just need to package it and make sure it works.

"Ubuntu has zero enterprise deployment and management tools" not sure I totally agree with you on this one. kickstart works on ubuntu just fine. they also have gui tools similiar to redhat for everything else the only exception that pops into my head is bind but I don't administer dns servers. in fact it could be argued more with all of ubuntu's packages and I do like adduser-ng and that isn't available on redhat.

the deployment tools we use are mostly from the vendor like hp ibm etc - they are pretty much the same - I can boot off an iso image from my desktop on a server across the country and deploy that way or use kickstart through the same web interface. we just need them plugged into the network and given an IP.

I still do prefer the openbios architecture though - I think the eeprom can't be beat. intel architecture is still just so 80's to me.