Red Hat Linux is now widely deployed on the servers in my data center. Users have no idea what operating system underlies our Web applications and databases, nor do they care, as long as those tools are highly available.
But the desktop is uncharted territory. Over the past year, I’ve been on a quest to find an operating system that balances ease of use, stability, low cost and high functionality. My experiences were the subject of an article in CIO magazine that described how I tried to use my enterprise applications with Windows XP, Mac OS X, Red Hat and Fedora. Recently, I’ve spent months running Novell’s SUSE Linux and Canonical Ltd.’s Ubuntu, and I’ll report on those efforts soon.