CentOS rules!
If you want the stability of Red Hat without the $, get CentOS. It is 100% binary compatible with Red Hat. They basically take the Red Hat source code and recompile it after taking out the branding, etc.
It is also the only Linux distro I could get to run on an ancient DELL laptop -- I mean, so old, even XP is slow as sin (people tend to forget when XP came out, the average laptop ran it pretty darn slow).
CentOS resurrected this laptop. I still have it and I still use it, though the track pad is getting a little whacky.
That said, CentOS is more for sysadmins and running servers. And yeah, I made the mistake of logging on as root at first -- if you do that, it logs everything you do. Even then, it was much faster than Windoze, so I didn't even notice until I read that it was a no-no. Yeah, if you need to give the admin password, it will prompt you.
