Since redhat has stopped support for its free distribution and does not plan to come up with a RedHat 10, we have started to look elsewhere for a distribution. And for the first time I have found that there aren't that many options for one to consider.
Mandrake seems to be in some financial trouble.
Suse just got bought out by Novel and we dont know whats gonna happen.
Debian is a totally different distribution from Redhat which would mean that the users would have to relearn everything. Plus it is not as easy to use as redhat was.
Slackware has the same problems as Debian, though they are a bit more severe in terms of hardship.
Knoppix is a good distribution that removes some of the problems from the original debian, but it is still not mature, and some machines I've tried it on have had stability problems.
Fedora is young and we dont know whats going to happen to it.
Personally I just love slackware. To me it is the best stable distribution, and it is easy to use. But I dont see any of my users, like professors manually editing config files. Hence, it is not an option at work. I've heard that the redhat enterprise workstation is for about $20, and it might even be cheaper. I dont know if that is per computer. But whatever it is, we might have to look at it. The main problem is probably that we would not want to purchase a boxed operating system. Though that might change considering that it is getting harder and harder to find a distribution that would suit our needs unless we buy support.
*BSD are not an option mainly because we dont know what kind of support they would have for applications like matlab, mathematica and labview or whatever else is being used on the machines here in the lab. We would rather stick to Linux for the moment.
