Quote Originally Posted by harken
I'll think on it, bfree, yet I'm not sure 100% whether to go with Debian or something else. I'm also considering MDK and RedHat.
What do you think?
That's nearly like asking a religious fanatic which is the true god!

I think unless you are interested in running enterprise products on a supported platform RedHat is useless!

My opinions of Fedora is just from random readings from various commentaries around the place, nothing has come close to convincing me to try it out yet. I think it is far too much of a beta program at the moment to really recommend to anyone.

Mandrake ... I haven't tried it in a long time. It's popularity seems to remain and I don't notice as many inane questions bouncing around about most other distros so either lots of people try and give up or it's reasonably polished.

What about Mepis, Suse/Novell and Ubuntu (Numbers 1, 3 and 5 respectively on distrowatches page hit ranking chart)? I think I'd be considering all of them first!

My personal preferences at this stage (for an installation) would be Debian, then Kanotix or I might try Ubuntu/Mepis, then Suse/Mandrake (well ok I'd probably keep finding Debian variants to use before I even got to them).

Horses for courses though, so if you can, try a few out! And even better if you can, partition your machine so you can share a home partition between two different Linux installs, so at any time you can have your current system and try out another systems without risking your main one, if you decide you like it you can switch and then install over the old one with the next one (or upgrade) you feel like trying.