LinuxQuestions.org - Which distro?

A couple of months ago i had Fedora Core 2, and it worked for a week or
two until it just stopped working; at boot it sed Red Hat Nash Version 3.bla
booting and then it freezed. Anyway i downloaded and installed slackware
but soon realized that i hated it because it didn't use rpm´s AND slapt-get
didn't take care of the dependencies, also the @-key didn't work
(im writing this on win2k :( ), apparently sv-latin wasn't the right keymap
(how the hell should i know? FC2 took care of that).

Anyway my question is: which distro should i use?
Im not a Linux Pro but i know how to edit the xorg.conf file,
install rpms et.c. Fedora Core 2 was perfect besides that it was a bit
slow and that the sound sometimes didn't work. Ive tried installing
gentoo but it's really hard to get it working, ive tried 3 times and one of
my teacher tried 2 times with no succses.

What i need is: stability, no CPU and RAM waste (so no KDE :) ),
something that can download all the missing libs easily (i just LOVE
yum install <package> :) ), good hardware and software support
(i hate having to compile software i donwload) and a bit
more user friendly then Gentoo. It sounds like that Debian is the Distro for
me, but ive heard that it hasn't been updated for a while.

Also im an OpenGL developer so it would't hurt if it had al the GL stuff
installed.