I recently had to write a formal report for my Business and Technical Writing course, and I decided to research the potential commercial viabilities of some major Linux distributions, operating under the premise that an imaginary alternative technology organization wanted to select one distro for public promotion. I evaluated Red Hat, Mandrake, SUSE, Debian and Ubuntu, because Distrowatch and some other websites clearly indicate that those have been the five most popular since at least 2002 (except for one period when Gentoo had made DW's top five). I went in thinking Red Hat would be the one, but my research actually favors SUSE. I found that SUSE has, or is in the process of making, a business version that can compete with RHEL, and that user reviews, on this site and elsewhere, indicate a higher level of satisfaction with the current SUSE. For RHEL, I found significant reports of bugs and of weaker-than-promised security.

(BTW, I got a perfect score.)

Congrats. Now please share the link to your report, otherwise this post isn't worth much IMSNHO.

Yes, well, I wasn't going to be egotistical and post it before someone indicated actual interest. A link? That could be difficult, since I handed in my report on paper. I suppose I could find some website...

Comparing Suse and RedHat is an apples and oranges comparison.

Suse has historically targeted the desktop market and RedHat has historically targeted the server market, with both customizing their products to fit those respective markets.

It wasn't so much a comparison, as an evaluation of which would be more widely successful if marketed.