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Originally Posted by evulish
The downside is they're all RPM-based. Since you have used Redhat in the past, you probably know that RPM's are the packages for Redhat Package Manager. It's a decent package system, but I hardly recommend it. Just using rpm can send a person into RPM hell where there are packages that need to be installed but you think they're already installed and you have to fight the entire system. That's normally the biggest flaw of those RPM-based system.
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Mandrake, SUSE, and Redhat all have tools that automatically resolve dependencies and keep you out of RPM hell. They are called urpmi, YAST, and up2date (or yum) respectively for the different distros. You only run into RPM hell when you install some random rpm you found on the web. However, you run into the same problem if you install a random .deb, ebuild, or .tgz.
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Originally Posted by evulish
Gentoo has the trump on Debian and Slack; you can compile the entire thing from scratch to optimize it for your computer.
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You can do that in debian with apt-source. In that way Debian has the trump because you can install the binary when you are in a hurry, and compile from source when you aren't. The closest that Gentoo has (that I'm aware of) is a stage 3 install.[/quote]
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Originally Posted by evulish
In the end, any distro will work on just about any type of hardware.. Any Linux software will work on pretty much any distro.
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Redhat and SUSE support the most hardware the easiest. Gentoo also supports a lot because you can patch your kernel as part of the install process. Generally, if your hardware is 6 months to a year old, it is very well supported. And once hardware is supported in linux, it is very rare for it to stop being supported, unlike windows.
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Originally Posted by evulish
Anyways, the best way to find the distro that's best for you is to try a few. If you have broadband and a few blank CD's, you can install as many as you want.
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You can also get CDs cheaply from cheapbytes.com. It sure beats trying to download on dialup (which I've done before) and borrowing CDs from friends (thanks Jim).