Hi,

I'm not sure if this is the right forum for this, but I'll ask anyways. I'm looking for a solid Linux distribution with the following features:

* Defaults to Gnome as desktop environment
* GTK and other X libraries installed (or installable from CD during install)
* KDevelop (not sure if this would work in gnome???)
* Firefox
* Good version of gcc/g++ along with glibc
* vim, with syntax highlighting pre-enabled
* NTFS read support + automount
* OpenOffice
* Good support for new hardware
* Loads of man and info pages

I don't need _all_ those features, I can do some myself. But I'd really prefer not to. The Linux programming class I have this year is killing me, I just need a working version to do all my homework in, which basically requires most of the above. I don't necessarily need KDevelop, but its what I'm currently using on Slackware and I like it. I preferably don't even want to compile my kernel once, at least the system should run the way I like it for a month or two until I can get a bunch of free time to tinker. Basically i have minimal time for tinkering (Slackware requires lots of tinkering ), so I would like a fairly beginner oriented distro, but with good support for programming. I wouldn't necessarily think the 2 go hand in hand.

Some I was thinking of, not sure if they're right for me:

Gentoo
Fedora
Ubuntu

BTW, we use Fedora at school (core 3) but I've heard bad things about a broken compiler toolchain? The textbook we're reading really stresses following standards in C, so I'd really prefer not to be forced into writing Fedora-specific hacks on what should be strict POSIX compliant code. The code we write this semester should port to many UNIX variants as well as BSD variants.

If this problem isn't even an issue in Fedora than I'm strongly considering it as my new distro. On the other hand, installing a new compiler is the last thing I have time for and I would just pick a different distro instead. Gentoo seems like a very long install process, and I've never really seen Ubuntu before. I'm wide open to other suggestions as I only know the major distros, and I've only tried like 4 in my life (RedHat, Mandrake, Slackware, Fedora).
Thanks,

- lowpro2k3

none of these have any significant bearing on your choice of dsitro whatsoever. just use the one you like most.

I've heard things about a well documented broken compiler toolchain in Fedora. Do you know anything about this?

It's not something i'm familiar with but it wouldn't suprise me, older versions of redhat used questionable versions of gcc 2. These sorts of issues are very very unlikely to affect you at all though. You're more likely to have problems when compiling intensive processing packages for things like that to rear their head. You'll not have a problem with simple c or c++ coding.

Maybe you should check out SuSE Linux Professional 9.3, some people don't like it that much, but it's quite decent. Anyhow, if you want to try it out click here, it has KDevelop, that you can install from the cd, and all the necessary files, libraries for programming.
Good luck.

just like any other popular distribution... ;-)

Fedora Core 4's compiler, GCC4, is even stricter than GCC3 (which most distributions are using), so if you're looking for standards compliance, it may be your best bet. Code which compiles with GCC4 will compile with earlier versions of GCC, but not necessarily the other way round.

Also, the GCC collection used on Linux is also used on (all?) the free BSDs and a fair number of commercial Unices, so portability shouldn't be an issue.

Dave