Fedora 9, Red Hat and windows xp

[jonathonp]

Ive been using Linux since Fedora 5 was released. I have also used ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386 although fedora has been my favourite. The question i have is that I'm a bit fed up with fedora 9 and i really want something stable where most things will work and also will have long term support but will still be new and cutting edge to a certain extent.

I don't mind paying for it either. i have used other distributions too (at least 15) that are mostly Debian and RPM based.

Is Red Hat the way to go?

Would it be better to have Red Hat installed along with Fedora and Windows XP so I always have an operating system that just works and does its job and has long term support?

With fedora developments ever changing and Windows XP being a target for viruses, spyware and adware that usually end up infiltrating the system and screwing it up in one way or another, it would be nice to have at least one operating system that is constant for a lengthy period of time.

Also I still use Windows XP since Linux does not have webcam support for yahoo as well a really good Sebilius alternative. I'm a big fan of pidgin and I hope one day it will have webcam support. If a commercial program was available for the Linux platform I would buy it.

Anyway to finish off my comments I don't mind paying for a professional distribution if their is one available?

[pete_1967]

Red Hat is not exactly cutting edge and packages geared for desktop use are somewhat limited thus you'll end up doing bit extra work by yourself to have all your convenience applications. There is an additional repository that concentrates porting Fedora packages for it though. If you're happy with that, it's a cracking distro. If you prefer not to pay for license, install and use CentOS which is RHEL in all but branding and few proprietary apps (CentOS has some extra repositories that give greater selection of packages as well).

The things is, if you want latest and greatest, you sacrifice the stability somewhat, so you need to make the decision where in the evolution tree you want to be.

[jonathonp]

thanks pete for the information. cheers ..))