Is linux free 5037

The difference between the free Mandriva and the paid for Mandriva is the inclusion of some non-open source drivers and media players (all of which are available for free elsewhere on the net). The people who pay get the new release one month earlier, aside from that the free and non-free versions are identical except that you have to do a little more work with the free version to get full multimedia support.

Redhat has a free version called Fedora Core and non-free versions called Redhat Enterprise Linux. Fedora Core is a development platform but as long as you wait for a few months after a new release it's very solid, I wouldn't call it bug ridden at all. If you use the version prior to the current version, which would be Fedora Core 3 at the moment, it's every bit as solid as Redhat Enterprise Linux. The current version of RHEL, RHEL 4.1, is virtually identical to Fedora Core 3. However if you want to use RHEL and not pay for it then there are several clones available, CentOS and Whitebox are the principal ones. The clones are built from the Redhat sources but have the Redhat logos removed. They are identical in everyway except for the missing logos and the fact that you don't get any support from Redhat.

So the bottom line is that Linux really is available for free. Support is also available for free, it's called newsgroups but you knew that because you posted to this newsgroup. The price of free is that you are expected to have some common sense and a certain degree of technical competence. If you don't have those you probably shouldn't be using Linux at all.