Red Hat is the undisputed commercial leader when it comes to Linux distros. A few years ago more distros were sharing the Linux market/userbase, but these days Red Hat has overcome its competitors in impressions, sales and popularity. Popularity doesn't always mean quality though (look at Windows9x for example), so after our world's
first review of Red Hat 8.0 a few months ago, I wanted to check out the new product, Red Hat 8.1, destined to be released sometime in the next one or two months. I downloaded and installed the
third beta of 8.1, codenamed Phoebe, and gave it a whirl. We will be featuring a full review when the final version becomes available, but here is a preliminary report on the current status, accompanied by three screenshots.
Update: Added one more screenshot.
I disagree with a distro being i686 only, maybe i586, but I have a Pentium233, and it is quite capable of running recent distros. I have FreeBSD 4.7 and SuSE 8.1 installed on it and the both run pretty fast. Even running KDE it isnt that bad.
So either stay at i386, make two different versions(this wouldnt be the easiest), or make it i586. AFAIK Anything less than a pentium would be really slow.