Ad-hoc Standard (Score -1, Offtopic)

I discussed this problem briefly with Patrick Volkerding of Slackware fame. I've been teaching Linux courses at a community college using Red Hat. Even though I mainly use Slackware, I decided to use Red Hat because of its popularity and the Common Criteria certification. The big problem I've had with Red Hat is that it modifies _EVERYTHING_. I've been bit and embarrassed a number of times because I'd try to show the students something that would work with any other distribution, but doesn't with Red Hat. One of my students asked for an easy way to check the status on user accounts, so I started to show them the -S option for the passwd command. Red Hat modifies passwd so that different and useless (IMHO) information is displayed.

Becuase of the problems and non-standard way Red Hat has of doing things, I've been thinking of using another distribution in class. Patrick complained that Red Hat does a lot of non-standard things with their distribution without thinking of the problems they are causing. His big complaint is that Red Hat's mess then becomes an ad-hoc standard.