Linux in Government: Linux Desktop Reviews, Part III

I’ll be honest with you. I tried Red Hat once, never tried it again. While this was a number of years back and I realize that a lot has changed, the OS really never impressed me all that much. I have found a number of other free distributions that completely blow Red Hat out of the water, while meeting my needs just fine. Still, Red Hat is said to be good for enterprise needs. I suppose this could be true, but I would need to see a lot more proof of this to be honest.

Unless you qualify as an enterprise class customer, you might find it difficult to obtain a copy of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) desktop. Red Hat requires a minimum purchase of 10 units, and the 10 unit starter pack costs $2,500. Individuals might find this to be a steep price, especially when you can download most Linux distributions for free, including Red Hat’s own Fedora Core product.

However, enterprises find the Red Hat service model to be especially helpful when they want to manage large numbers of desktop computers. Even small- to medium-sized businesses find the Red Hat cost structure to be comparatively inexpensive. In addition, the bundled services surpass any other offering for enterprise class desktops, regardless of the platform.

In this article, we discuss how the RHEL desktop meets and exceeds a maturity model for open source. We also discuss the design and usability of the desktop product itself. [Read the rest]