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John,

I'm glad to read you're still tinkering with RH9, and haven't given up to reinstall windows like in the past. I found that RH9 is really close to 'Mom-Ready', in my books, and provides most of the other qualities for which I'm looking right now before I switch over to linux. I think that I may be the last to actually run linux on the desktop, which is ironic because I'm the guy who works on linux all day and I only use windows as a stable ssh/moz/mp3 platform. Silly me.

We found that most of the installer issues, especially those that gripe about mounting and unmounting, are really low-memory issues. I'm serious. UnitedLinux, which is really SuSE's linux-like product with a name change, requires a boatload of RAM, for instance. I chant the "Linux works on older hardware" mantra myself, but it seems I can't get this 20Mb laptop moved from win98 to any more recent OS - and Linux SHOULD be the obvious choice here. RH9 has a nifty profile for really small installs, and I'm hoping that may help, but I think the non-intuitive errors occuring in low RAM situations, as well as the recent demand for lots of RAM for the shiny GUI installers (AND their text equivalents, for no reason), is a serious problem for me .. and it may have affected you in your install.

Two new policies in RH.com really concern me. Since my day-to-day (well-paid) work shows that the market for the super-stable RH62 is very much alive, I'm concerned about RH.com's newest plan to support only a year worth of any of their distro versions that actually get any updates. One seems to now need to choose between Rarely Updated and having to upgrade the entire distro every year. This is NOT acceptable for any markets in which RH is being used extensively, and forces me, a lazy user who manages a series of Soho samba/http/firewall/imap/ldap/smtp boxes, to consier moving all my boxes to another distro that offers both a longer support window and updates as frequently as pre-9 RH offers.

Secondly, the idea that RH will offer nothing but dot-zero releases suggests that they really are not concerned with letting any of their distros 'cook' to the tasty pefection as was allowed with RH52, RH62 and RH73. RH.com's dot-zero releases are avoided for a reason, and it's the same reason that RH's terminal minor-releases are so popular: because the terminal minor releases been tested in the field and FIXED to the point where they can be relied upon. We NEED RH 8.2 or RH 9.2 as a well-cooked platform on which we can actually install something mission-critical.

Don't you dare ask one of my SoHo clients to pay a kilobuck for the Advanced offering. They'll toss another distro back in my face, one that still uses minor-releases, or ask me about regular kilobuck Unix instead. (Who does Unix on Intel with any kind of clue? Thanks RH, you may push my SoHos to SCO. Did Ransom Love put you up to this cruel no-minor-releases joke?) The problem is, SoHos are where it's at right now.

While you may think I'm bashing RH, don't assume that. I've looked at all the major Linux distros out there - including one that's so over-complicated with krud that it's now incompatible and I refer to it as 'Linux-Like' - and can only conclude that RH is still the king, still, this year. I'd list the differences, but nationalistic linux-like distros seems to have the most rabid supporters in their own blissfully ignorant countrymen. The short of it is, RH is about the least-worst there is, despite the problems I claim and forecast. Once PLD gets moving, or CL start making a distro of their own again <sniff>, or MDK stop arbitrarily renaming packages and making life difficult for package porters, it may be anyone's game again. I hope RH fixes the policy mistakes I've seen other companies make, but only so I don't have to reinstall my main development machines.

Stay with it. I'm sure it gets easier once the eerie similarities to windows are dismissed and one learns what is really a different way of thinking and working. Next, please try the new Ximian stuff on top of RH9, and tell me if it is as gorgeous as I want it to be in the hands of a windows user. Who knows? I may yet take the plunge myself, one day, install my one MS machine as Linux, and finally homogenize my office.

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