Does it really matter which distro I choose?
 

I've been trying RH9 and Mandriva 2006 - both seem good (I'm a novice).
What functionality can I lose by choosing one particular distro instead of another? In particular, RH9 is free, installs well, and is well documented. What would I gain by choosing say the latest SUSE or Mandriva (which appears to lack printable manuals)? Are there packages which won't run on older releases?
Does the kernel version have a major effect on anything important?
Apologies if this has been asked before - couldn't find it in my searches.

David Kinston
melbourne.au

the only real reson to not use rh9 is the age. it's knocking on and in a world of modular software where things rely on other things, it gets increasingly hard to upgrade it. features in one over the other are largely down to what YOU install, not what is installed by default. this is not true for things like ssue's Yast, but that's real exceotion.

Re: Does it really matter which distro I choose?
 

I think you'll find a large number of distros are free in cost and usually free (as opposed to proprietary) in terms of the software that comes with them. Fedora Core 3 and 4 are the more up-to-date user versions of Red Hat. PCLinuxOS is a live CD/installer CD version of Mandriva that uses Synaptic Package Manager to manage applications. Ubuntu, Mepis, Blag, Gentoo, are all free. And there are free versions of SuSE available for download.