Never used Fedora before
 

If everything goes smoothly the new Fedora will be released tomorrow and I want to give it a try. But I have some problems with it: on the forums I visited a mostly have read replies about Fedora like this: “it’s sucks and mostly used by U. S. patriots for patriotic purposes; it has no multimedia support and has broken repositories with broken packages, it crashes and unstable…” and so on.
But on the other side I also heard that Fedora has probably the biggest community around the world (about 26 000 registered users) so I know I probably should simply try it, but I’ve already have about 30-40 CDs with different distros lying around my PC because I can use only one distro at one time.
Please tell me what advantages Fedora has over other popular distros like for example Mandrake (my current distro). Any help will be appreciated.
Thanks in advance!

I don't find where it will have a lot of advantages over Mandrake, save that the packages in Fedora are generally more current. If that is of paramount importance to you then by all means go for it. Otherwise, I would just sit tight and enjoy what you have. If there is something you specifically don't like about Mandrake then perhaps it would be best to start there and just solve whatever that issue might be instead of going through another install.

If you are happy with mandrake and it works for you, you should stick with it.

Folk just weaning off windows find RH distros comfortable.

Experienced folk find it tends to be a tad fat and slow by default, and they have to do a lot of subtle tweaking. Then there are always folk who have a total ashole of a time on their first attempt and just hate the thing ever since.

A complete newbie can usually get a default installation of fedora going smoothly in a few hours. Problems usually arise from weird hardware configs, non-standard installs (bootloader on a removeable drive for eg.), or the plain old user "ass/u/me". (oh - and toshiba laptops for some reason)

Anaconda will detect your hardware 99.99% of the time and there is minimal post-install config required. HW support is the best I've seen. I've been answering questions about soundcards and so on which were automatically detected and configured in FC2.

There is an issue about licences and proprietary codecs. RH has responded to these by dropping them from the distro. So - after the yum update, many people will go and install mp3 support into xmms and install mplayer themselves.

You'll find the unnofficial faqs for FC3 illuminating. There should be one allong for FC4 soon.

www.fedorafaq.org

Well, I don’t know, but my major problem with the newest Mandrake (I have the download edition) is that it’s remind me on some kind of shareware software. I know Mandrake is a commercial distribution and therefore if I want a full featured OS, then I should purchase their full edition or spend time to get the additional applications, but unfortunately there are not too many applications available currently for this distro and with the default package set I even can’t compile the most apps I need. That is why I decided to not use commercial distros anymore (if possible) and move to use something like Debian of Fedora. Probably I just need to try both of them and then choose the best.

Debian or Fedora would have been my suggestion, unless you want to try Slackware or Yoper?

There are distro reviews on this board of course.