George (Joe Linux) is probably the only person on the island who has
tried essentially every Linux distro on earth. I know he has at least
tried Mandrake 8.2, Red Hat 7.3, SuSE 8 (by me on his behalf), Caldera
3.1.1, Lycoris (previously called Redmond Linux), Xandros, ELX (from
India), TurboLinux, Vector Linux 2.5 (which he was heavily involved in
the development), Slackware, and perhaps a few others that I am not
aware of. His experience in desktop Linux is truly invaluable (but not
appreciated here).
I don't think a Linux server guru will use a stock Linux distro without
some customization. Neither for Linux desktop.
For desktops, the criteria are ease of installation (which includes
hardware detection), stability, whether they can be easily customized to
your like, and whether they will run your programs.
I used to like SuSE 7.3 a lot, but, as influenced by George, I am now
firmly in the Mandrake 8.2 camp. I have not tried Red Hat 7.3 yet, but
I heard it has problems with Win4Lin 4.0. I am sure this problem will
be solved sooner or later. However, as George told me, Red Hat 7.3 does
not seem accommodate IceWM, plus so far I am quite pleased with Mandrake
8.2, I don't see any need to play with Red Hat 7.3.
IceWM (with customization) is a very important part of business Linux
desktops equation. In order to entice Windows users to the Linux camp,
you would want your desktop to take as little time as possible to load,
and it should be absolutely stable.
