...and the two distro's which are basically RHEL without the branding and the expensive support subscription: CentOS (maintained by CERN in Switzerland ***edited: explanation of this shocking statement, below***) and Scientific Linux (maintained by FermiLab in Illinois).Q5sys wrote:...At this point the distros that can be taken seriously, IMHO, is Red Hat's offerings....
Since Germany's SAP (it makes the manufacturing process management software used by Mercedes, BMW, and VW-Audi) has standardized on OpenSuSE, OpenSuSE is not going to disappear. It is possible that SAP may take OpenSuSE's further development in-house. No telling how this would affect OpenSuSE's availability.
One problem with settling on a single standard is, it makes you vulnerable to your distro being hijacked by whoever can gain control of that standard by first embracing it and then extending it to include their own proprietary tweaks. Microsoft is not the only offender in this regard. Just look at the devolution of KDE between versions 3.5 and 4. Or, look at how Ubuntu has fallen away from open source principles relative to Debian.
The universal consensus seems to be that LibreOffice is destined for success and Apache OpenOffice is doomed.
But the fact remains, every version of LibreOffice I've tried so far either fails to start or else crashes with bad result (e.g. involuntary reboot) on my local install of Quirky Unicorn. Meanwhile, Apache OpenOffice runs like a cross between a Swiss watch and a bat outta hell!