OK, so I’m not really in black (well, my desktop case is), but I am back. I finally re-installed my system and just got the website back up and running. Sticking with the whole Red Hat theme I decided to switch to the Fedora project. With the release of Core 1 the installation was a rather easy transition from Red Hat Linux 9, so I’ve got no real complaints outside of the difficulties I had getting MySQL to work. There’s a definite feel of continuity here and that’s made transfering configs rather easy.
I didn’t really get to try out any new flavors as I planned, but I doubt it would have been much of a contest. SuSE charges money for their distro ISOs, so that was really only an option for work. As much as I wanted to try Gentoo, all of my attempted installations failed. I’d still like to give it another try but I probably won’t be switching thebox again anytime soon. And then there was Debian. No offense (since I know how popular their distro has becaome), but I just couldn’t make it past the setup. It was horrendous to say the least. They are light-years behind in this area, and that simply killed it for me. So it’s Fedora all the way (for now).
Next (tonight or tomorrow morning) I’ll be blissfully upgrading to the long-awaited release of WordPress 1.0. Oh it’s an exciting time for me indeed 
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Not saying you should switch distro but I would just like to point out that there is a whole wide range of installers for Debian: Debian Installers
Since you didn’t know this and this added to your dissapiontment with Debian it might come in handy to know, should you ever want to try again. (Or anyone else reading this
)
Debian Installers: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Debian/installers.html
(a-tag didnt seem to work)
Thank you very much. I think I had heard of it a while ago but forgot about it when I actually did the (rather limited) testing. I really didn’t get to do as much research as I had hoped. Since I’ll still be looking for a new distro at work, I’ll happily put Debian back on the list of candidates (I really want to give apt-get a try), and I’m sure Mike (whose German co-workers insist on using Debian) will be curious to give them a try.
That certainly restores my faith in other distros. I was seriously shocked to see how horrible the default installer was considering how many people are using it these days. Hopefully I’ll get to give some feedback later this week.