What are some reasons people choose red hat over another distro like Gentoo? I was under the impression that the linux community is fed up with RPMs? And gentoo makes up for that problem.... I know they have lots of money, and marketing compared to other distros, and I think they provide lots of support, but then why cant Gentoo start a company and give support?

hi there

rpms have both advantags and disadvantages
while everyone out there is not an linux expert so u can't expect that everyone is comfortabe with the source

installing rpm is very easy

but u need to have a rpm for every distrubution and version that is the disadvantage.

regards

For one.. Red Hat has been around for a long time.. Also.. Red Hat is focused on Enterprise solutions... They are known for their support and compatibility with other big names like Oracle and Compaq and whatnot...

Some linux distro's are run by companies and some are run by communities.... SuSE is another large company, now owned by novell...

Debian is strictly and organization devoted to the development of the OS... not corporate products... Though it is very well developed OS... you simply cannot call up Debian and ask for support...

This is why Red Hat is so popular.. I started with red hat... but only used it for about 2 months... I do have a copy of RHEL WS 3 which I am saving to activate my subscription until my web server is ready to go up...

I have never heard of anyone having aproblems with RPMs though... They are an easy way to manage packages...

Hope I helped your understanding of corporate vs. community linux...

and the MOTHER of all reasons why

Because Gentoo is a registered Non Profit organisation.

A distro which is RPM-based doesn't force the user to rely on RPMs only. For example, I use SuSE most of the time, which is RPM-based. However, once I get the basic system set up, with gcc/make and the other essentials, just about everything else is installed from source. The RPM is just an easy way to get the system set up initially.