Can I use RHEL without technical support for free on my desktop?

you can but there is no point at all. Just use CentOS. Rhel without support is pointless, as you don't get access to updates etc. CentOS provides everything you're missing out on, except commercial support.

A free release is the evaluation version that expires after 30 days. You can continue to use it thereafter but you will not get support nor updates. The best alternative, in my opinion, is CentOS a free rebuild of Red Hat. Updates usually are released after 1-2 days from the release of the official RH ones.

depends what u mean by free but there is an option to get desktop edition of redhat which is kind of free
redhat server edition is free but without support but can be downloaded for 30 days trial

get fedora which i prefer over centos because of the more wide community involvement

Centos is all good when looking for a free alternative to redhat, but they tend to be behind on releases.
It took them ages to move to 6.0
redhat 6.1 is available now, and I don't see it at centos.org

another option is fedora. Not as closely related to redhat, but definitely free, and a good way to try cutting edge software months or even years before redhat switches to it in their distro.

your choice

I wouldn't be using Fedora in a server environment.

Fedora is only supported for Current release - 2, and runs a new release roughly every six months.

So unless you want to be rebuilding your server every 12 months, i would stick with CentOS.

The OP did explicitly mention DESKTOP not server..

Scientific Linux 6 is another option. It's another RHEL clone, almost identical to CentOS, but with some additional packages not included in RHEL. SL is typically a lot more current than CentOS, and also gives you the option to continue to receive security updates for older point releases without doing a full upgrade to the latest release. http://distrowatch.com/table.php?dis...ion=scientific

"Can" or "should"? Two very different questions.

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Why would you want RHEL for a desktop?

If you knew enough about Linux that RHEL for a desktop was an informed choice, you wouldn't have asked the question you asked. So I'll assume RHEL was a very uninformed choice.

You probably would be better off with a beginner friendly desktop oriented distribution such as Ubuntu.

If you did have some sound reason for wanting RHEL, then you probably want Centos. Centos is just like RHEL except that updates (which you really need) are free in Centos and not in RHEL. You may not need technical support, but I think you need updates. Just like RHEL, Centos is not a good choice for a desktop, especially for a desktop for a beginner. Others mentioned Centos lags a little behind the latest RHEL, which is true but for almost all uses is irrelevant.

Depending on your real needs, Fedora might be your best choice. It is in the Red Hat family of distributions (unlike Ubuntu), which might matter to you. It is better for desktop than RHEL or Centos. It runs ahead of RHEL (up to the bleeding edge) rather than behind as Centos does. But like Centos and RHEL, it is less beginner friendly than Ubuntu.

can you? sure
should you? probably not, especially when you have fedora and other derivatives to play with, which make far more suitable desktop distributions than RHEL.

fedora isn't exactly the most 'newbie' friendly distribution, however, on the same token it is far from the least `newbie` friendly distribution around (I myself started with 'yellowdog', which is a powerpc spin of redhat and didn't have much trouble learning it).

perhaps if you were to state what your requirements/requisites are and what you are trying to accomplish (basically, what do you intend to DO with your machine, and we can tell you better what distribution might suit your needs.

in my personal experience, there is very little that is so distribution specific that it can't be done with another distribution, unless you are talking about proprietary software built against a very specific distribution.

*AHEM*

I must take exception to that last sentence. I found that Ubuntu severely limited everyone I showed Linux to, as a beginner, and I show Linux to a lot of folks. Fedora 14 was easily just as simple to sit down and use, plus it scales to your level of expertise. In my opinion.

But yeah, it simply is not wise to use RHEL for desktops. Best to go with Fedora. IMO.