We have been using RedHat Enterprise Linux 4 Desktop at work for a couple of years now, it starting to get a bit old so we were looking to upgrade our systems to version 5. The problem is that even though RedHat claim on their website that version 4 and 5 are comparable for the Desktop version, really they are not.

RedHat have taken virtually all of the development libraries out Desktop and put them in the 'Workstation Option' so you can't really compile anything. Gcc is there, but is missing g++ so you can't compile any C++ programs. Emacs, PHP, Subversion and Nmap have also gone into the Workstation option.

I can't really understand this, surely most users of desktop are going to use these applications, and compile programs from source, as it is you can't even install the Nvidia binary driver due to the lack of the kernel-devel package. So basically now if you were using RHEL4 Desktop you now need RHEL5 Desktop with the Workstation 'option' which costs over twice as much ($179 vs. $80)