Catharsis - slowly my FC4 world crumbles around me

[Dave Gutteridge]

Thank you for the link to distrowatch. I wish I had come across that 
earlier.

I'm thinking that I want to go with the open source distribution that 
has the largest community. Are there other sites one could recommend 
that might verify which is the most popular open source distro? Going by 
distrowatch, it would seem that Ubuntu is the main one.

Actually, now that I'm thinking of it, how big an impact is it deciding 
between distros? I mean, they all run Gnome or KDE, they all run the 
same Linux applications. Hmmm... suddenly it occurs to me I have no idea 
what makes one distro better than another. All I know is that if Fedora 
is intended to be in permanent experimentation mode, then that's a 
little too unstable for me.

And then I think more, and I realize that whenever I download drivers or 
something, I often see that they are built for Red Hat or Mandrake 
kernels or something. Are some distros more limited than others?

I'm in one of those moments when asking more questions is making me more 
confused. Help!

Dave