Redhat

Submitted by Simon Waters on Tue, 02/16/2010 - 22:45

Redhat (current is Enterprise Linux 5) are one of the oldest commerical Linux vendors, and known for employing Alan Cox (a key Linux kernel maintainer).

Redhat's commercial interests are more focused at the server side, ignoring the Desktop somewhat. Although the Fedora Project continues as a sort of grass-root development effort that looks to provide a good Desktop experience. Redhat have good relationships with a number of hardware vendors, and you may find better hardware support. They also place emphasis on supporting specific web applications stacks (LAMP), which means you can buy a web server from vendors, and get a commercial support package from one vendor to cover the lot upto your web application (assuming it is a covered package).

You'd choose Redhat for Enterprise servers, especially web servers, or database servers where you want good 3rd part support for hardware or software.

In the GNUⁱ/Linux world no one ever gets fired for buying Redhat.