[CALUG] Linux choices

[Russ]

Hello,

Happy Holidays to all!

I appreciate all the input, and I enjoyed reading all the comments.  
It appears that the choice has a lot to do with personal preference.
My experience with Linux is minimal, so I wanted something stable with
good support.  I'm not sure what kind of support I can expect for free. 
I have some experience installing  Slackware, and RH9 on some older
machines, but I had trouble getting things to work.  Based on the
responses I saw I'll probaly try Ubuntu.  I hear people say that Ubuntu is
not as challenging as other versions of Linux, so I'll continue to try
other distros on other machines as a learning tool.

FWIW,
In my original question, I wasnt specifically singling out RHEL, but I
took an intensive beginners week long sysadmin class and I became a little
partial to RHEL.  I should have also mentioned SUSE vs. openSUSE. The
cheapest support I saw for RHEL was 349.00 per year which is definitely
not in my budget for a home computer.  Most of my programming experience
is educational not professional.  Also, most of the programming that I
have done was using plain text editors and command line compiling.  I have
used IDE's that came with compilers, but I am accustomed to the command
line.  I find working woth Linux to be a good learning tool, and call
me crazy but Linux seems a little more intuitive than windows. 

Comments are welcomed. I'm just a beginner.

Sincerely,

Russ Main