Sick of Vista? Opportunity's knocking for current college students

[noimagination]

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Would programs programmed for Linux that work on Red Hat also work on Ubuntu? What are the differences between the two? Would Red Hat be better for engineering studies or it doesn’t matter?

Yes, although the actual software may be distributed in a different package format.

The only reason to use RHEL is for the support and enterprise backend that’s provided, but other than that, it’s just a nightmare in terms of having the latest features, being up to date, customization, etc.</p>

<p>Your laptop is for your own use, and in your case, RHEL does not really provide anything that Ubuntu doesn’t provide. Meanwhile, Ubuntu is easier to use, has a much nicer packaging system, is really fine-tuned, and updated. If you really want familiarity, I suggest you at least run Fedora, which is a more regular distro in which RHEL gets its components from. The problem is, stuff doesn’t tend to get incorporated in RHEL until it’s almost three years old!

I’m probably going to make myself unpopular around here with this opinion, but personally recommend RHEL. I use Scientific Linux (a clone of RHEL) dual-booted with CRUX on my desktop, and it works wonderfully. You seem to assume that newer is better; in my experience, this is not the case. The overwhelming majority of new software adds little in terms of usability, and for the exceptions you can always grab a newer version from update repositories or compile it yourself. I never recommend any distribution based on Debian (such as Ubuntu) due to Debian’s policy of patching packages downstream, which can (and does) lead to security compromises.</p>