Who is the 'Market Leader'
 

When I first started with Linux back in the good ol' days of the late 1990s, Red Hat was the Linux Distribution. If somebody new Linux, they knew Red Hat. But who is it these days? In the Enterprise, it would have to be Red Hat Enterprise but in the desktop distributions, who is the market leader? I know DistroWatch say Ubuntu is but I would be interested to hear people's thoughts!

Seb

Slackware by the look of things...

umm.. if.. by 'market' you mean commercial version.. it's probably still..as it has been...a tie between SuSE and Red Hat..

as for popularity... Slackware is huge.. but not 'commercial' and generally not deployed as enterprise desktops... in fact.. I would be interested to find ANY corporation with a large-scale slackware environment...

why do you ask?

I would say either RH or Suse, based solely on the fact that most big commercial apps (Maya for example) are supported on them. I don't particulary think those are the best distros as I don't believe there is such a thing as a "best" distro, just one that is best for your own situation.

I recently saw something that showed (in the US, at least) that they were ranked RedHat/Suse/Mandrake (1/2/3), but that was probably sales in $. RH was roughly an order of magnitude above the others; 200,000 vs 30,000 - 50,000. Still, it's a rough approximation of relative "market penetration". :)