Hello folks,

I just got out of graduate school and I'm able to run linux full time again. I installed Suse 10 and it's just pissing me off! Yast is for the lizards and it sucks compared to Yum or Apt.

So, how is the project doing is my question?? It's almost been two years since running a fully dedicated linux box! (I ran Redhat for about 5 years before taking a break with XP for school.)

In my opinion, Fedora is getting really good.
I've been searching a bit, testing various distros, currently running Debian/Mepis but I'll probably switch to Fedora.
It handles hardware real good, and there are frontends to yum now. Yum or apt4rpm is still not as good as apt for Debian but it is catching up.
You'll need to spend some time getting repos to work, but when it's fixed you have almost as many packages as for Debian available. (Don't know abot Suse really, always disliked that one.)

And since I'm currently working as technician in a school, Fedora is a better choice for my workstation. It has good support for Windows-networking - only not for local NTFS-partitions for some strange reason! If you dual-boot you'll have to recompile the kernel to be able to read from NTFS-partitions. That's the only downside I've noticed so far.

Depends on your DE of choice. I'm using FC4 now because, quitre frankly, the latest version of KDE is just too damn buggy and FC is GNOME-centric. Both SuSE and Mandriva are KDE-centric. Yes, I'm sure someone willscream "you can use any DE you want with any distro" and they're technically right, but Red Hat develops their proprietary stuff with GTK (same as GNOME) and SuSE and Mandriva do all their proprietary stuff with QT (same as KDE) so you'll have way fewer problems if you keep that in mind, IMVHO. All three are RPM-based, unlike Debian.