I Don't really know the difference between KDE And Gnome , as I understand it there are just different desktops running on top of the linux kernerl ??
I have used ubuntu quite a lot on different machines. However I managed to mess up the install on my laptop and it wouldnt boot.
I also updated to 11.04 at it froze at the end and left me with a non booting linux install.
I originally went for Ubuntu because I was led to believe it was the easiest and most user friendly version.
Have the other distros caught up.
Is red hat, yellow dog etc as easy to install, update and add appliactions etc, as windows ?
In a word, yes. If you are not beholden to any flavor of linux yet (and it doesn't sound as if you are), then a distro is a distro is a distro.
Now, having said that...
Some are more easy to install than others. At the base end, yes it is just some bling running on top of the linux kernel, but there is a difference in how the Desktop Environments (which are currently: KDE, Gnome, XFCE, and LXDE) are handled between distros. There is also a difference in how often they are updated to the latest and greatest, how "serious" they take "security", what is their default desktop environment, and how they package their software. Ubuntu is based on debian, so the toolset is apt and the packages are .deb. Yellow Dog, Suse, RHEL, Fedora, CentOS and some others use RPM, and the tools are probably yum or apt as well. Dependency hell is largely a thing of the past, so the old debate of RPM vs DEB is pretty much null and void these days. As for ease of installation of programs, it is pretty easy, assuming that you know what you are wanting. Most installs should be done on a nice clean partition (always good to put your /home on its own partition for just such reasonings).
If you are/were an amigoid (seems a safe assumption
) you know the drill pretty good - RTFM, don't be afraid of mucking about a bit with configs, check their forums for specific issues for your specific hardware. lspci, lsusb, ifconfig, etc. Know the hardware you have and driver issues should be minimized.
For most people not wanting to "play around" and expect stability I would go with debian stable or CentOS. For PPC I'd go with Yellow Dog (oldest and probably the best supported - it ONLY does PPC, as opposed to an afterthought). Honestly, for the debian flavors these days, I much prefer Linux Mint over the standard Ubuntu.
If you want a very stable and very fast system built from the ground up (without compiling - sorry Gentoo!) then read up on Arch.
