Ubuntu or Red Hat, who takes it?!

Who's distro will reign supreme. Well there's a lot of leeway there. Ubuntu is certainly the front runner in terms of popular opinion, but if you look at things from the perspective of the business owner I think you'll see that Red Hat, though having lost street cred is still a more appealing platform choice overall than Ubuntu.

While both distributions are pretty user friendly, even I can acknowledge that RH has lost a lot ground. While my RHEL 4WS install is definately stable, there's elements to it that have made porting in older apps more tricky and it hasn't been so great to conform with lib standards. However, does any of this matter as you make the change from SMB to Enterprise? Here's where I'm thinking Ubuntu doesn't always match up. Kernel changes, patches etc all require careful maintenance. With most distributions you're able to take things to the bleeding edge. That isn't always the best course when you're dealing with high availability systems. In this regard some of the additional tweaks/QA etc that RH supposedly provides with its products is a good "warm fuzzy" for IT management.

Personally I've gotten to the point that I no longer really care which OS I use, so long as I can ramp up on my needed skills for it and be off. I've run Debian, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Fedora, Red Hat Linux and truthfully other than the file structure differences and variations on package management, and libraries learning the fundamentals of a distribution helps more than memorizing. While I can see where the press is going, calling Ubuntu the next replacement to RH, I tend to wonder if the realization of going back to their roots will set in and we dont' see RH changing their stance on standards and compliance in the future (not near but hey maybe by RHEL 6)