choosing the right linux distro
 

Hi all,

Yet-another-question about the choice of a linux distro...

'till today, I've been using Red Hat (6.2 to 9) for all purposes. As you all know by now, we should forget about RH.
I need to use linux for the fun of it as well as for professional reasons.

For private use, after reading many posts at LQ, I've chosen Debian and installed it. No problem with it, it is really what I need. One question however, should I install everything with apt-get or do you, debian users, prefer to use tar.gz versions ?
And, among the great linux distros (the ones that dont propose nice gui utils ...) : Debian, Gentoo, Slackware,etc. , which one do you prefer and for what reason (compared to the others).

Now, on the professional side, I want to keep up with tools, utils,...that are most often used in a pro environment. Actually, I don't want to switch to RH Entreprise (don't have the money for it, and don't fancy...). But, if I'm aksed in the future to install or fix a problem in linux, chances are that it'll be a Red Hat running. So which distro should I choose so that it's more or less equivalent to RH ? Mandrake (isn't it too user friendly ?), Suse,... ?
I know that it's still linux, whether it be Debian, Gentoo, Suse, Red Hat, Mandrake...and I feel comfortable with the command line. But there are some minor differences (update system, some .conf files, network config,...) that can really make you loosing time...and that's what I want to avoid.
I thought about Fedora, but i really dislike the permanent "beta" side of it...

By the way, where can I download the lastest Suse iso's (in case I choose this one) ? No live eval or ftp, I want full .iso images

Large debate, I know, but I don't have the time to evaluate all distro's myself. And I'd like advice from linux professionals too...

TIA

As for a suse iso, you're out of luck, suse provides no iso's for there distro. And as for a distro i would highly recommend slackware. Why?? It's hard to say, but it's the first distro that i really fell in love with. I've not been a linux user for very long (about six or eight months), but i found slackware to be the easiest to install and maintain (red-hat's install was easier but it was hard to maintain, and really slow to boot). With slack you're not going to have the huge library of instantly apt-get installable software that debian does; but slackware has a tool called swaret (www.swaret.org) which will allow you to easilly install or update your window manager or programs like mozilla, xmms, mplayer etc. But the best thing about swaret is the easy update/installation of librarys/dependancies. If a program requires a new version of gcc just type "swaret --upgrade gcc". If you just want to install all library's "swaret --install lib". Best of all, swaret can be used to upgrade your entire system with only one comand. One more reasone to try slackware is the great community. If you go to the distro's forum on this site you will notice that slackware is by far the most active. In the slackware forum i usually recieved answers in minutes.

Check the page of suse again, recently they added this feature
(for example http://www.suse.de/en/private/downlo...nux/index.html )
Regards