What is a good Distro?
 

Originally I was told to run Gentoo then later that I should run Debian instead. Both from what I understand were good distro's with some differences. I however had no luck getting Debian (3.0 RC4) to work on my system properly, couldn't get into KDE, wasn't able to locate network card, etc.

My friend had an old version of Red Hat 8.0 so we used it instead. It had a very easy to understand install and everything went great the first time. My limited experience with Linux has been with Red Hat so when it came to using everything it was familar. Now I've been looking more into things I found that 8.0 is really old and that any future versions of Red Hat now basically cost as your paying for Support and not the Linux (hhmm sounds familar of Microsoft saying your not purchasing the software just the license but I won't get into that :p).

Now I don't exactly understand what people mean when they say it is outdated and I should upgrade. I mean what exactly am I missing out on by not upgrading?

To explain a little more of what I use my system for it is mainly to learn about Linux, Java as well as administrating and running web pages. I also use it to store files and backup things on the network and as a game server. So nothing really fancy or big. I believe I'm fine sticking with what I'm currently using but I'm just curious on when people say I should upgrade, just what exactly does upgrading get me?

For a painless start, I suggest you go with either http://www.Ubuntulinux.org (or Kubuntu, with a different GUI) or http:www.SimplyMEPIS.org -- I like both and have them installed on two different machines, but people have differing opinions... One of the best ways is to download the live CD version, run it without installing and see which recognizes all your hardware and suits you.

Once one of those is running fine, then you can get familiar with Linux and go with more *difficult* distros.

Not one of those discussions again distro vs. distro...

As I see upgrading is just patching up the security issues (yes linux has those too, not as many as MS but anyway).

By ugrading people usualy think of reinstalling their distro with a new distro. But it doesn't need to be that way. You could see which applications are not secure and either not run them or install newer versions of those applications (which are patched up).

However if your machine is not used for all that much, that your life would depend on it, you should be safe running old distros as well.

Re: What is a good Distro?
 

depends on what you want to do ( application wise). you can stick with what you have and be just fine. The biggest problem you will face is if you see some app you gotta have, and it's a newer app, lets say it uses >=gnome2.8 libraries or >=kde-3.3 libraries, in these cases, you will be very busy upgrading alot of packages to get that new bleeding edge app to run.