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Redhat, Mandrake, etc. are the market leaders. Debian can probably never surpass them in terms of numbers. However, if we can at least join the market leaders in getting certified and supported, it'll make a big difference both "appearance-wise" and "vendor support-wise". This is my concern. And I was hoping that more of you guys running Debian in commercial environments would feel the same way, but perhaps you don't care about this issue, or you do not see it as important (perhaps you've found a way around this, or you have a solution?) If so, please share it with the rest of us.
I agree up to the point that vendor support is something that will *really* help Debian. I personally only choose hardware which is supported by Debian nativly, but with software that's a somewhat different thing. Not much to choose from sometimes. I certainly understand that vendors prefer to have some sort of standard platform (although I'm not convinced that they will really gurantee "runs on _every_ LSB compliant platform". Prob quite some will still continue to say "runs on RH" and might just add one or the other LSB distro.) Apart from this more or less "political" point of view the main problem seesm to be: Does the LSB _force_ Debian to use rpm? If not, great! Both LSB certification AND dpkg/apt would be perfect. *If* LSB compliance really means "use rpm" and there's no way to safely (in terms of dpkg/apt integrity) use rpm, I think the question simply can be reduced to "LSB *or* Debian package managment"? And I won't hesitate a second... Still I'll be very very happy to find a way around this situation. Cheers, Marcel