dammy wrote:
by redrumloa on 2004/1/20 22:16:44
Any-hoo I'm attempting to swear off M$ completely, and going to give Red Hat another shot. So far the installer seems buggy, but I'll stick it out. Any other Red Hat users here?
I use RedHat on three systems (was four, had to go evil M$ for a must have application). I would suggest that you go with RH 10 which is now known as Fedora which is currently with Core 1 release.
Excellent suggestion. Fedora really
is "Red Hat Linux 10", only with a faster release/update cycle. It's still developed by Red Hat themselves - among others. The possible downside is that it's "only" community supported, you can't buy it in the stores as a Red Hat supported distribution. OTOH I have personally never bought any commercial Linux distro with support, and as usual the mailing lists and forums are filled with helpful people from Red Hat should you need assistance.
I understand that this is not suitable for all, as some apparently prefer to be told where they're allowed to buy their hardware and pay extra for it in order to participate on a Yahoo Groups mailinglist for their OS... 
Core 2 release is scheduled for Feb 14th.
Final release on April 2nd - April 5th, surely? Unless I've missed some good news...
Anyway, that will have goodies like kernel 2.6, GNOME 2.6, KDE 3.2...
I will also suggest buying Crossover so you can still get all the nifty web experience you're use to via IE without M$ anchor. ;-)
Some have already mentioned the lack of included commercial/patented/"unfree" media support, which is a result of RH's/Fedora's "GPL-or-bust" policy. This is easily solved with a quick downloading session at e.g. FreshRPMs, if you don't want to compile things like mplayer yourself. With mplayer/xine and Windows DLLs for WMP/Quicktime support plus OO.org and AbiWord/Gnumeric for MS Office support the only attraction with Crossover for me would be the Shockwave plugin.
Repositories like FreshRPMs can also be configured as additional sources for yum/up2date to keep third party stuff updated as easily as the Fedora Core stuff.
