Weeell, might be partly my fault. You see, last time I used Linux, you had to recompile everything if you wanted to get past the lilo boot prompt. So I'm used to pretty much do things as I want. I read in redhat that v9 was their latest free stable release, so I went for that one instead of Fedora, cause if it works, the machine will be production. Of course I don't see the point in paying for linux, in that case I'd rather stay with MS, so the enterprise version was excluded.
The thing is, I was wrong. v9 is somewhat dead, and the new KDE and the likes won't install over it. I now have a mixed Fedora core 1/Redhat v9 install... where KDE seems to hiccup every now and then.
Since the latest Quanta thing will work only on the latest KDE... you see the problem, right? Now I'm DLing the whole Fedora core 1 release, and will see what I can do with that.
Well, I'd say with Windows you install everything and it runs and you don't know what the hell's going on inside (I remember when they started to seriously use the registry with Win95... nobody knew how that worked). With linux, either you learn from the start how everything works, or you won't be able to do anything done
I've stumbled into a couple of very nice tools, though, that serve to ease the pain of package dependency checking when updating one package:
Have you ever heard the term RPM hell? Well forget it. This "apt" package brings Debian's excellent package management system to Red Hat. And as a bonus there is a cool graphical front end. RPMS have never been easier. Keeping your system updated has never been easier. Installing the coolest Linux apps has never been easier. apt for RPM along with http://www.freshrpms.net/ are two Red Hat must haves.
I'd add the GUI Sinaptic to that, but that's a very nice tool that checks repositories and updates all necessary packages... when possible, that is
I'll check Eclipse as well. The WYSIWYG part is important to me only because I can easily move around to find the controls I need to change.