[HLUG] Fedora 9 PackageKit freezing and distro recommendations

[Paul Stenning]

I've been playing with a few distros to see if there is anything that 
takes my fancy better than Ubuntu.

Fedora 9 looks good and seems to work well.  Plus it's not brown! 
However I am having a lot of problems with the PackageKit software 
installer thing.  It keeps stalling with a "waiting for other tasks to 
complete" message which never clears.  So if I have chosen several 
packages to install and get to this I have to quit it and lose the 
options I set.  From Googling this seems to be a fairly common problem 
with lots of moaning but no decent solutions.  I have the same problem 
with two installs (one on VMware and one on a real PC).  It looks like 
they haven't learnt from the problems with openSUSE 10.1 a while ago 
when their package manager was broken.

So with Fedora out of the running and deleted, what other distros are 
recommended for ease of use and reliability?  Requirements are Gnome 
desktop (KDE feels clunky and overblown to me), the ability to upgrade 
from one release to the next without wiping the disk and starting again, 
recent packages by default (OpenOffice 2.4, Firefox 3.0 etc) without 
pointless renaming (I want Firefox not Iceweazle!), as much as possibe 
configurable from the GUI, active development, and plenty of packages in 
the repositories.  I guess I'm describing Ubuntu really, but I'm keen to 
look at some others too.  Suggestions welcomed please!