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.
This is mostly subjective, you say KDE is lightyears in front, I say Gnome/GTK+ is way better and more powerful. Also if one wants to build a desktop aiming to become a big player in the world, you do not want to force 3. party developers to pay license fees to a small company in Norway, which is the case with KDE. Not everyone can do GPL apps.