I don't believe anyone is squabling. I think any one of us could give up our preferred distro for around 4 or 5 different distros and be just as happy. The reasons for having a preferred distro are usually minor. For instance, RedHat is my preferred distro mainly because it's the one I am the most familar with. It was the 3rd distro I tried about 8 years ago. This was before there was a Mandrake.
Mandrake came about because RedHat didn't set KDE up as the default GUI. The first version of Mandrake was little more than RedHat with KDE set as the default. It used to be much more of a pain to set up Mandrake as a server (something that I mainly used Linux for in the early days).
Today there isn't a lot of difference in the top 3 commercial Linux distros but one of my biggest reasons for sticking with RedHat is there is a vast amount of support for it and more 3rd party stuff. Sure you may have varying degrees of success getting the 3rd party stuff work in Mandrake but the vendor may not support it. The nice new desktop is just a bonus for me.
But don't get me wrong. If RedHat does something to piss me off I could switch to Mandrake, SuSe, or Debian in two shakes and not break a sweat doing it. It's nice having several top players and not one of them have 95% of the Linux market. Competition is what makes them all get better so rapidly.
[ November 27, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]
