[ILUG] Which Desktop Distro?

[Conor Wynne]

Hi all,

I have decided that I'm going back to desktop linux after a long absense.
I am not trying to start a distro war, although its been a while since
we had one ;-0

Here are my options as I see them :...

1. RHEL4.5 (currently installed and fully patched up as of last night,
apps configured etc)
2. RHEL5 -- currently downloading the ISO's from rhn...
3. OpenSUSE - I've never really been a fan of SLES/SUSE
4. Ubuntu, now as much as I like this distro as a desktop, it does not
support RPM and the fs layout differs from redhat based systems.
5. FC7, I ran FC7 (or was it 6) on my ibook g4 this summer during our
3 weeks camper van holiday in France. I was initially impressed with
the performance of it, but after three weeks it started to annoy me --
biggest gripe was it ran the system way way hotter than OSX, and the
battery drained much more quickly as a result. I could not even see
the reason for it. The mouse worked perfectly, and all of a sudden it
would start to behave erratically. FC on PPC is just not right yet.
This would be installed on X86, so no such worries.

I know esx (vi3) very well, but do not get as much exposure to xen et al.
I would like to install beryl aswell, and although I have a perfectly
functionning rhel4.5 box, I really do not want to be modifying kernels
etc, or moving away from rpm/up2date/yum based package managers.

FC7 is currently torrenting - slowly, so it looks like rhel5 will
finish downloading before FC7 does. Which would be better? DISTRO
WARS...

Q: Is there any point in using xen with a 32-bit CPU? The box is a P4,
1GB, 250GB, Radeon XT850, so its a decent enough system.

p.s.: I have valid subscriptions for rhn, so no worries from that. I
really do like rhel4, its mature, stable and a decent performer.
Opinions welcome.

Regards
Conor.