[TriLUG] Switching distros based on marketing, rumor, FUD -- or based on technical merit?

[Jeremy Portzer]

Over the past few days, I've seen a lot of people mention that they will
be moving away from Red Hat because they don't like its "new
direction."  While I am fully supportive of choice in the distro wars, I
don't quite understand the need to switch based on marketing information
(or rumors of such), or FUD from various sources.  Wouldn't it be more
appropriate to use a distribution for its technical merits intead?

For example, I've seen a certain other distro hyped as easier for new
users, or better for the desktop.  I tried to install it once, and the
network installer crashed, reproducibly, so I went back to Red Hat. 
This is an anecdotal case, and not meant to be a criticism of this
distro, but the point is it didn't live up to the hype for me.  I chose
not to use it because it didn't work, NOT because I thought Red Hat was
"serving the consumer" better.

Sure, the position and comments of a company are important to the
general goal of Linux advocacy.  I too am dissapointed in the Red Hat
CEO's comments about the status of Linux on the desktop.  But these
types of things will NOT make me stop using Red Hat / Fedora, as I use
them based on their technical merits.  Fedora Core 1 hasn't even been
released yet, and still everyone is griping that it's not for them.  Why
don't you TRY it first ?

--Jeremy

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| Jeremy Portzer        jeremyp at pobox.com      trilug.org/~jeremy     |
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