Red Hat could mean curtains for Windoze

An
interview with Matthew Szulik of Red Hat has been published in today’s Independent. Red Hat has just issued another desktop version of its Linux desktop, which it will provide on a subscription basis to companies at $5 per month. This is the same company which last year killed off its standard Linux package, largely because most people who used it downloaded it from the Internet or bought books with a CD of the operating system inside. Despite the fact that Red Hat has the best looking (and most consistent) user interface around, its configuration programs have always been limited and unfriendly compared to SuSE‘s YaST. Its Fedora Core 1 release had a quote of 192 Mb (megabytes) as a practical minimum for running a graphical desktop when 128Mb was well enough for me to run SuSE with all the trimmings. In fact, over the year and a half or so I’ve been using Linux, I’ve tried: Mandrake, Red Hat / Fedora, Libranet (“GNU/Linux bliss”, not!), FreeBSD, College Linux, of those I can remember, and I’ve always come back to SuSE. My copy of the latest version is (I hope) in the parcel delivery system somewhere between Asknet’s warehouse in Germany and a delivery depot somewhere here in London. I intend to publish my opinion here when I’ve taken it for a spin (insha Allah). As for Red Hat, if it drives Windoze out of the market, so much the better, because almost anything which runs on Red Hat’s Linux will run on SUSE’s anyway.