This is a very US centric perspective.  Outside the US Suse is the dominate distro in both enterprise and consumer markets.  Suse in Europe and Asia is as big an enterprise leader as Red Hat is in the US.  Red Hat is a miniscule share in Europe.

I would disagree with your statement about Debian being the most used Server OS.  If you had said "Debian Based" then I might agree with you, but hardly anyone uses pure Debian on their servers.  They use Ubuntu because of the ease of use.  CentOS is also a huge selection.  When IT staff that I've interacted with choose the distro (in the US) it's either CentOS or Red Hat.  I don't know of any but the most underfunded (meaning only old hardware) that willingly choose Debian for their servers

Of Distro's still around that you may know, Slackware is the oldest, then Debian, Suse and Red Hat in that order.

What do you mean by "Suse is the Novell of linux"?

Gentoo has never been the most popular distro in any except maybe the "do-it-yourself" category.

Glenn

On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 3:05 PM, Jonathan Hutchins <hutchins@tarcanfel.org> wrote:
RedHat is probably the most recognized and specified distro in the business
community (ie by managers as opposed to IT people.  A lot of the
documentation at http://tldp.org was based on (Pre-Enterprize) RedHat, and
the book Running Linux, and excellent introductory reference, was based on
it.  Running CentOS, the recompiled open version, or Fedora, the "community"
based free version is a good way to learn the Red Hat Way.

Debian, on the other hand, is probably the most used Server OS, excluding the
above enterprize environment.  When the IT staff have chosen the distro
instead of Marketing or Management, the server run Debian.  It's
upgradability, reliability, and long-term stability are second to none.

A lot of the popular distributions are re-workings of Debian that use newer
packages.  Ubuntu, Mint, and Arch are all based on Debian, as are many
others.  Mandriva is the main Red Hat based distribution that's not
affiliated with Red Hat.  SuSE uses the same package system as Red Hat, but
is very different.  Gentoo and Slackware represent their own branches of the
tree, with Slackware being one of the oldest.

Ubuntu is the populist.  SuSE is the Novell of Linux, IBM bases it's POS
systems on it.  Gentoo was the most popular a few years ago, but is a hobby
unto itself.
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