Maarten Koster, President, Novell Asia Pacific, talks to Kushal Shah about the different strategies adopted by Novell and the company’s partnership with Microsoft.

Every now and then you'll come across someone arguing that, instead of having several different desktop environments (Xfce, GNOME, KDE), their respective developers should team up to create The Perfect DE. Apart from the fact that this is just impossible, I'd like to argue that this fragmentation is actually beneficial. Benefits that go beyond "more choice".

Some people will argue with me in that these GNU/Linux distributions are as advanced as you want them to be. Well, of course Linux is all about choice. I took the user base perspective though and what I have for you today is a few distros which do not hide the manual (or for people like me, beautiful) underlying configuration.

At first, ranking GNU/Linux distributions seems alien to the spirit of free software. After all, free software is all about choice. What should matter is that your distro suits you, not how others judge it.

At the LinuxWorld expo in San Francisco, analyst Jay Lyman of the 451 Group spoke about the potential for enterprise adoption of Ubuntu and the impact that community-driven Linux distributions will have on the market.

Lately I've been reading a lot of criticism about the number of Linux distros -- too many choices with too many interfaces and too much duplication in software application development. KDE, GNOME, Xfce, fluxbox, Enlightenment... it's all too intimidating -- too confusing for potential Linux converts.

Oracle and now IBM seem to have strange ideas about creating a business around open source software for the enterprise. First it was Oracle's Unbreakable Linux program, derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux sans its proprietary bits and supported for peanuts to beat RHEL and similar community projects such as CentOS.

For quite a few pundits out there, the fact that there are so many Linux distributions is a bit troubling to them. I am not sure why this argument keeps coming up, but it goes something like this: there are X Linux distros out there, which is too many to choose from for users, and creates a strain on developer resources.

There's no dearth of Linux distributions for desktop users or even for running high availability servers. But if you are a do-it-yourself computer user, your choice of Linux distros is fairly limited. You can build Linux from scratch with Linux from Scratch or compile your own set of packages with Gentoo.