Hi Red Hat fans,

I'm a Linux newbie and I'm wondering if some of you would tell me the reasons you use Red Hat, and how heartily you would recommend it to someone else. Thanks.

i liked red hat because there was a lot of distro specific documentation available on their site, b/c it installed easy and ran pretty well, and because it could use apt. i prefer slack for learning linux, though.

I mostly used redhat in the beginning for it's ease of use, ie: package management, and installation. I second that slackware is a better learning tool, a plus is that you rarely ever see compilation errors, or dependency hell.

Nobody "loves" RedHat. Join the Slackmolians, Debiolians or Gentoolians if ya want affection. You'll be RTFMing & loving it ...... But if you're a casual *nix Lusr and want a semi_comprehensible working *nix system pretty-quick -- excepting castrated MM -- RedHat is as sure a bet as there is.

Dude - I'm forever indebted to Redhat for introducing me to the most excellent world of Linux. It's easy to install, the docs are informative, well written, and pretty complete, and there's a pretty good amount of support out there for RH. Having said that though, after the initial thrill wore off, Redhat seemed kind of lacking. I had no issues with stability, reliability, security, etc, and I have nothing negative to say about Redhat, but like a chick who seems to be super desirable till you go out with her a few times and you realize that, well, she's kind of ordinary, Redhat just wasn't doing it for me.

So I burned every distro ISO I could download, tried them all out, and bro, Slackware wins hands down. I don't have a tattoo, but if I did, it would be the Slack logo. I recommend you give it a try. -- J.W.

Personally, I think the company is excellent. For those of you who haven't had a chance, read "Under the radar". The book walks the reader through the initial years leading up to the IPO.

Furthermore, Redhat continues to impress me when I consider events like the march on San Francisco to promote Open Source in government and the more recent legal actions against SCO including the 1 million dollar contribution to the Open Source Now fund.

It is important to remember that Redhat's contributions to the development and acceptance of GNU/Linux go well beyond its current software bundle.

Had redhat donated to the Free-software foundation?

I'd say they do in many ways (see above). However, if you're concerned about financial contributions, you can always check for yourself by looking at the list of contributers on fsf.org

I like because of the logo, shadowman. Pretty stupid reason, isn't it?

Red Hat has the best installation, documentation hands-down. and guess what? you can still use the command-line to configure your system and install packages from source.

As far as dependency errors: you will get those with ANY distro if your installing a package that depends on other packages you don't have. You can get apt for Red Hat and make those dependency errors go bye-bye.

Plus the Bluecurve theme is the coolest

I disagree with the people who are saying that Red Hat isn't a good distribution for learning Linux. Just because gui tools are there doesn't mean you have to use them. Just because RPM is there doesn't mean you can't compile stuff from scratch. I teach Red Hat classes for a living and hardly even cover the graphical tools in my classes, for example. We use the text config files just like any other distribution. But what makes Red Hat a successful distribution among semi/non-technical users as well as enterprise-level admins is that things don't *have* to be done the "hard way".

And as for the documentation, that is the single biggest thing that impressed me about Red Hat after having used just about every other distro out there. And not jus the install guide. Check out the customization and reference guides sometime:

Customization:
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/l.../custom-guide/

Reference:
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/l...ual/ref-guide/

That said, I don't believe there's such a thing as a "best" distribution out there. The beauty of Linux is that you can try a bunch out and see what you think.

http://www.linuxiso.org/

is a good start. Enjoy!

omg ppl actually like bluecurve? Redhat since 7.2 when I began using it has become the closest to resembling windows imho. I'm not saying redhat is not a good distribution, but because of the popularity they seem to be cutting corners and they mess way too much with the software that they distribute and because of this they seem to have triple the amount of security and bug fixes than any other distro that I have used.

I hate redhat

Red Hat was my first Linux distro that I installed on my PC, and will always have a place in my "heart" but I'm a Debian man! Nah Red Hat is still a great distro and I still use it from time to time, but I mainly use Debian for most of my PC activities. Of course I will snatch up Red Hat X when it is released but at the moment I prefer Debian GNU/Linux over any other distro out there. Yes, I would recommend it and I do recommended it to newbies who are curious about jumping into Linux.

Well you can love linux if you have nothing better to do with you time but to figure out how to make it work.