I finally bought myself a laptop--a Dell Inspiron 1525N. The 'N' apparently means "No stinking Windows". I purposely bought the version with Ubuntu on it to add to the industry statistics of people buying Linux computers. I recommend everybody do the same.

But I wiped Ubuntu away without even booting it and installed Fedora Core 9.

I have nothing against Ubuntu; I use it sometimes. But I like RPMs much better than DEBs and the update mechanism is one of the most important features of any Linux distro, so I'm using Fedora.

Anyway, I'm very pleased with my purchase and with the ease of using Fedora.

I'm just curious: Is there some problem you had with the update system in Ubuntu?
What is it about an RPM that you like better than a DEB?

If you're happy with Fedora that's fine. I was just curious on what issues you were basing your comparison.
I've had more update failures/problems/quirks/issues in Fedora than I can count.

I've been using Mandriva for years, and manipulating the RPM database has become second nature. For example, if flash doesn't seem to be displaying right, I begin my analysis by typing commands like these without even thinking about them. I don't have to stop and wonder how to figure out what packages I have installed that contain some word. I form the general question in my mind and my fingers type out a command to show me.

Similarly, if I find an unusual file in /usr/bin and I wonder where it came from, I can easily find out, e.g.: I'm sure apt or apt-get has similar commands to all the ones I've programmed into my fingers, and I'm slowly learning a little. But RPMs just seem more natural for me to work with.

Also, it's a tiny thing, but Mandriva's urpmi --auto-update and Fedora's yum update are each one step, whereas systems using apt require two.