RedHat, Fedora future?

[Tim Kossack]

Am Do, den 05.02.2004 schrieb Robert Marcano um 20:20:
> On Thu, 2004-02-05 at 14:45, Tim Kossack wrote:
> > Am Do, den 05.02.2004 schrieb Dave Jones um 19:25:
> > > On Thu, 2004-02-05 at 18:10, Tim Kossack wrote:
> > > > Am Do, den 05.02.2004 schrieb Robin Laing um 16:50:
> > > > 
> > > > > Red Hat or SUSE for the enterprise? Hint: Bet the chameleon
> > > > > <http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/01/28/219249>
> > > > 
> > > > i also wondered (and still wonder) why red hat has given up to compete
> > > > in the desktop-market.
> > > 
> > > You shouldn't believe everything you read on slashdot.
> > > 
> > > Take a peek at the frontpage of http://www.redhat.com for example.
> > > It's not even as if our commercial desktop offering is well hidden,
> > > it takes up half the page.
> > > 
> > > 	Dave
> > 
> > what i meant was that the mentioned companies invest far more effort into
> > usability and polishness of their desktop(s) (plugins, tools) than red hat
> > does (that is, if red hat prof. workstation doesn't offer more in this
> > respect than fc - and by that i don't mean access to rhn as well as
> > higher reliability). i should've written "red hat has _basically_ given
> > up...if i'm not mistaken, that was also the main point of the article.
> 
> I feel that the RedHat products are based on "polished" GNOME desktops.
> Maybe you are talking about proprietary MP3 plugins, proprietary media
> players, proprietary windows emulation layers, etc. that the other
> companies includes in their offerings, in my opinion that doesn't make a
> "polished" OSS based desktop, it makes a proprietary OS, something that
> I am trying to avoid ;-)

i don't just mean plug-ins, but also the general effort red hat puts
into their desktop (as well as server) offering(s) compared to the
competition trying to make the life of the user and the admin easier.
you can of course rest on the idealistic standpoint, that
non-oss/proprietary are per se evil, but let's face it - there are
certain standards which you have to take into account, and without java,
flash, mp3, video etc. i consider even an os for the corporate desktop
not up to the task. companies are after a fully-featured replacement for
windows which includes all these things or at least makes it easy to get
them from a user's perspective. as far as any linux-distro shipping
without those, that's certainly not the case. that's why suse, sun,
lindows are shipping their desktop offerings with at least part of this
stuff already included (if red hat prof. ws includes these things, i
stand corrected).
to sum it up - red hat's current desktop offerings are basically their
enterprise server putted in a differently labeled box, and i wouldn't
exactly call that a viable desktop (strategy). 

i'm not bashing, but simply stating the facts. with the competiton being
ahead in that respect, let's see what happens...