Hi Kev,
I'm not sure if your RH flaming is based on experience with certain versions, or more a philosophical beef with RH's technical approach, or just the fact that they are trying to run public for profit company standing on the shoulders of developers of free software. Or do you hate them because they have the largest market share so far, and thus every error they make is much amplified in the overall Linux story?
RH9 and FC are freely downloadable and updatable with yum and other mechanisms from free repositories. Are you still mad at RH, because it used to be different or your info is outdated? So at least your point about free updates seems unjustified from my experience.
Saying that RPM is bad may very well be justified but how come your anger isn't directed at all RPM based distro's, not just RH. Yes, I know RH invented RPM. If it is so evil, it does not excuse anyone else from using it. So again, I don't see why you are giving a different level of anger towards RH, than for example SuSE.
I share your frustrations in the area of hardware drivers. However, I don't know why you are singling out RH in your anger. Is there anyone better? If yes, I would be delighted to find out, which distro would make the sound and the wireless G on my rather newish Toshiba laptop work. Again, why the singular anger towards RH?
And let's be honest, even Windows hardware driver stuff updating and finding is only a very partial success. For much of the hardware you have to go to the manufacturer's site, rather than getting it from a central windows update site. And of course, if you are running older windows versions, you are hooped, too.
The hardware driver issue is a very difficult one, where "blame" can't be pinned simplistically. Macintosh and BSD users have long felt this issue, too. And users of older versions of windows can be as screwed for some newer hardware as anyone in Linux land. Whom should I blame when my favorite piece of hardware doesn't work with my favorite piece of software? I can blame everyone or no-one, but I don't think I can single out one distro.
Why is it fundamentally evil that RH makes money? If you find making money on Linux evil, you'll have to start with Linus, and most certainly you'll have to include SuSE and in a less direct way many other Linux developers (companies and individuals).
Don't get me wrong, I'm no RH fanboy, but I honestly don't understand why you single them out for so much anger.
...Niels
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