Goineasy9 wrote:

I would say try Fedora. A Live CD is great for evaluation. I tried the Fedora 11 pre-release and was impressed. Actually impressed enough to want to install it on one of my boxes as a replacement for Debian Sid. Am waiting for the actual release though, which is due any day.
I hear that kvm (virtualization) is represented very well on the new release, and I can't wait to give it a try.

@Goineasy9,

That's encouraging to hear about F11 - I'm looking forward to the release!

Fedora was... OK, I didn't get too in-depth with it although I've only ran it though virtualbox. Basically the only difference I saw between it and Ubuntu was the package manager, although; like I said. I didn't spend much time with it...

I'm talking like... not even two hours before I got bored.

What was your problem w/ openSUSE? I'm not a big RH/Fedora fan. I feel they break things. My personal opinion. I happen to use openSUSE and love it. I've always got more helpful support from the suse guys too than from the red hat guys. I would say, though, if you're used to the apt setup, then stick w/ the Debian based distros. I don't and won't use them, but if you like them more power to you. If you want to start to learn rpm based distros, then give opensuse a try again. Post in the Opensuse forms any problems you have and I'm sure you'll get some help.

Fedora's ok - I used it at work a couple of years ago and it was solid enough, but not particularly exciting. Currently I run CentOS on my honker workstation, and Ubuntu 9.04 on my laptop. Each has its advantages. I was especially impressed when Ubuntu supported my Sprint Sierra wireless broadband USB modem without any configuration on my part. I just plugged it in, and told it to connect - voila! It did the same thing for my internal bluetooth nic when I installed that recently. The CentOS system is my major development box, and I run multiple guest operating systems in VirtualBox. It has been uber-reliable for me.

So, if you like Ubuntu and are running on a laptop, stay with that. If you want to check out fedora, then run it in a VM until you are convinced that you would prefer that to Ubuntu. They are both state-of-the-art operating systems.