DISTRO advise (was Re: [Nottingham] k3b install, yum, gcc and libs)

[David Wolfson]

This seems to be a question that goes around us newbies a lot, and I have to say is one of the more difficult things to get past when 'upgrading' from windows.  

'Which distro?'.  

The general answer seems to be 'it doesn't really matter'.  It's like buying a car; you can get anyting from the flash new beemer (that hasn't got a bonnent catch and you have to take to the garge to fill the wash bottle), to the series one landrover (that you know ever nut and bolt of)(disclaimer: these mechanical metaphors are fictional and not intended to represent any distro, real or fictional).

Anyway, I'm not going to ask the same old question, as I said at the start of the previous thread:
'For want of a reason to get hold of another distro, I've installed RH9'

But whilst takling the .rpm dependacies problem, there were a couple of throw away comments that got me thinking:

'May I suggest upgrading to Fed2...'

'which is why Gentoo is the greatest Distro ever !'

I've got RH9, 'cos that's what I have discs for, but as RH have gone enterprise, am I likely to find dwindling support/downloads/community activity etc?  And anyway, I like the whole 'beer-free' bussiness with linux, and although I've not got the mozzilla mug yet, I can't help wondering if using redhat is not exactly in the communtiy spirit.  I said I wasn't going to ask which distro (I'd be inclinde to Fedora as I gather it's be closest to what I've used before, but might be presuadable to gentoo or debian... one for the pub I think), but what I do want to ask is; how easy is it to swap?  Is it a case of formating the relavant partitions and starting fresh?  Are some swaps easier than others (e.g RH-fedora)?  Am I fussing about nothing, and should just get on and use the damn thing?

Sorry for a very long draw out e-mail, but I didn't want to be asking the same old question!

Dave


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