I remember when RedHat dropped their desktop version (ah, Redhat 9...). At the time I remember thinking is was a dumb move. That having a good, well supported

I remember when RedHat dropped their desktop version (ah, Redhat 9...). At the time I remember thinking is was a dumb move. That having a good, well supported enterprise desktop was too important to RedHat and Linux in general. Then they did their half-hearted spinoff into what is now Fedora, and for a while it seemed like it desktop Linux languished. Now, I'm pretty sure it was the right move. Enterprise Linux pays the bills. There are very few major installations of Linux desktops, and that's about the only place where you could extract revenue. I think that they decided that they couldn't make both the enterprise and desktop users happy. Enterprise servers want to be stable and predictable. Desktop users want the new shiny. They had to choose one. So they went out, bought a suit, and went with the ones that gave them more money. Based upon their current financials, it's hard to argue with that strategy. And the funny thing is, they still managed to contribute more code to Gnome than Ubuntu. As a side note: I used to run all Red Hat servers... then dabbled in Gentoo but recently I've used all Ubuntu. Just this past week I've run into some issues with some very important software (to me), that seems to be related to something in Ubuntu. It runs perfectly in the more conservative RHEL 5, but fails on the more recent Ubuntu. This has made me think a lot about what I'll be using for my servers in the future...