I've had Redhat9 now for a while and am getting used to linux a lot more it's commands, advantages etc. I wanted to know about upgrading to a new distro maybe suse? But first I have a few questions:

1. I want something as stable as redhat with matching or more advanced options such as, the apt-get program, commonly supported online binary files. Most sites I've found only usually provide redhat, suse and mandrake binary downloads of their apps etc Which other distros would you recommend?

2. As I've never changed from redhat I don't know, would I loose all the content on my harddrive that I have now?

1. I suggest Slackware (Because I'm a zealot ). It's very stable, with SWareTor slapt-get you get the apt-getness you're looking for, and LinuxPackages provides Slackware packages for many programs. Even if there is no package for a program, it's easy to compile the source and use checkinstall to install the program.

2. If your /home directory is on a seperate partition then no, you will not loose your content in /home. When you switch distros you have to format a partition. It's usually a good idea to keep /home on a seperate partition in case something happens to the main one you have your personal data.

I personally like slackware also. It's not as sugar coated as some of the other distro's I've tried but it's stable.

You are probably used to rpm installs. But Nis is right, between Swaret, slapt-get, and linuxpackages.org you should be able to get pretty much anything. And if those don't work just compile from source. On occation I've used rpm2tgz to convert a binary rpm to a tgz slackware package.

If you try slackware do a man pkgtool to learn about the setup utility.

Brian