The Bell Tolls for Redhat

In a surprising shift in direction, Redhat recently announced it would abandon the Linux desktop market.

I've used Redhat Linux for my own desktop environment for about 5 years. I've become more and more disappointed in their "upgrades". With each release of their desktop software, they change and break things. They've made it increasingly difficult to remain loyal to the distribution. I've been entirely disgruntled for the last 3 years, but due to familiarity, I've stuck with the distro, putting off switching to more stable and user-conscious distributions such as Gentoo and Debian.

But they've finally forced my move, and I'm happy about it. This decision marks the downfall of Redhat. They have chosen to take the path of Sun: focus on the server market. And they've made the same mistake: without a loyal following of desktop users, no OS can hope to achieve any significant success in the high end server market. Sun is beginning to give up on its "high end" Solaris OS and beginning to adopt Linux as a last, desperate effort to survive. Now Redhat is choosing the same fate.

But as everyday Linux users migrate from Redhat to other distributions, what distribution are they likely to promote when it comes to high-end server applications? Redhat did not define Linux's ability to serve the high end server market, and they can never hope to fulfill it if they abandon their everyday users. These users are the same folks who will be the one to migrate failing Windows servers to Linux. And why would they choose Redhat when they've long become comfortable with another, more capable, less buggy, distribution? Well, they won't. And this will be the end of Redhat.

You read it here first folks, Redhat is dead.