hello, i've been a redhat user for like 2 years now. i'm a big kde fan and i've always kind of disliked how redhat is geared towards gnome. finally in redhat 8.0, they mucked up some xft2 and freetype stuff that won't allow qt to compile with xft support without some hacks and now i'm ready to find a new distro. i've looked at gentoo, suse, and mandrake. i ruled out suse cuz i don't think its that popular and i think i'd have a hard time getting support. gentoo is neat sounding but also sounds like kind of pain in the butt at the same time...;) mandrake is very similar to redhat, no? so i should be very comfortable moving to mandrake, right?
i have a few questions. 1) i usually compile from source when installing stuff, but i do use rpm sometimes when i'm in a hurry or its something small that i'm installing. i usually use rpmfind.net to get the packages. when i search rpmfind.net for a package, i usually get a list and i select the one that corresponds to "redhat 8.0". i noticed that the mandrake packages on rpmfind.net aren't associated with distro versions...whats up with that? i mean, if i download a "mandrake" package off rpmfind.net, will it work with mandrake 8.0, 9.0, etc? 2) i get most of my linux questions answered on the redhat mailing list. things get answered there very quickly as it is an extremely high traffic list. is this mandrake list as popular? what about the "expert" list? i'm not a super hardcore linux guru expert, but i can manage pretty well. 3) whats with "mdk" packages? 4) is mandrake biased towards either kde or gnome? i noticed on the mandrake info page, it says that mandrake makes using linux easy to use by offering gui frontends to lot of administrative tasks. are these just x applications or are they either kde or gnome/gtk specific? 5) as i said before, i get most of my rpms from rpmfind.net. i tried searching for qt and gtk packages for mandrake and didn't find much...whats with that? i have more questions, but i can't remember them now...=) thanks for the help/info, christopher
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