It has been a while. I note that my last post was complaining about Debian. Actually, it was praising Debian as much as complaining about it. There are some amazing things about Debian. The user community is unparalleled, both in the sheer number of packages submitted to the archives, and to the help they can offer. And apt is similarly brilliant. But the rate at which stable releases come out is much too slow, and I got tired of living on the edge with Sid.
So I tried out Fedora Core 2 this weekend, and I've been amazed. Fedora, in conjunction with fedora.us, provides a great set of stable packages, and yum is working pretty nicely as a replacement for apt (although I realize that I can use apt/synaptic with FC).