Re: Distro for corporate environments?
There are 2 major players in the corporate environment: Red Hat & Novell.
Of those two, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is basically a server-only distro (even though they sponsor the desktop-friendly Fedora Project and provide some GUI-based packages). Conversely, Novell ships distros targeting both server and desktop - SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) & SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) respectively. Both of Novell's corporate distros are just different, fortified & super-QA'ed, subsets of the openSUSE distro.
As noted cardinals_fan noted, CentOS is a free clone of RHEL. Canonical's Ubuntu is an up-and-comer in the corporate space - and the advantage (or disadvantage) of Ubuntu is that the version for "enthusiasts" is the same as the "corporate" version. Some companies also use Debian as a server platform.
The value of being certified on a particular platform is variable on where you live. In the US, Red Hat is the dominant corporate Linux. Europe is a more level playing field, although Germany still has some extra love for their homegrown (Suse). Not sure about elsewhere in the world. You should also know that:
1. The Novell/Microsoft agreement seems to have spurred along additional momentum for Novell's offerings so far.
2. As of this post...Red Hat still hasn't laid anyone off. It could be that they're simply delaying an announcement, but by all indications they appear to be in a position of strength despite the economic slowdown.
As far as programming skills go, the "best" language to know still depends on what you're trying to get done. As far as scripting goes, Python & Ruby are the popular kids in school right now. Toolkits...the next version of Qt (4.5) will also have the LGPL as an available license - that should make Qt truly trendy as a cross-platform solution. Otherwise, C# is gaining traction although some in the F/OSS space seem to oppose it on the basis that it's from Bill's house.
GIMP should really change it's name to GINP in the tradition of WINE & GNU.
GIMP (GINP) Is Not Photoshop.
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