I tried both Mandriva Limited Edition 2005 (Mandrake 10.2, more or less) and Fedora Core 4. While Mandriva wins out over Fedora for being the most usable right out of the box*, I ultimately went with Fedora, mainly because of the package manager, "yum". I've played with apt-get and urpmi and similar tools in the past, but none hold a candle to 'yum'.
After using Linux as my desktop OS on and off for quite a while, I've never been more pleased with it than now. It detected my digital camera upon plugging it in, and asked me what I wanted to do. I'm even able to grab the video from my digital camcorder and edit it, encode it, and burn it to CD or DVD. There's even a few decent music collection managers. Things like this that you take for granted in Windows, used to be a major pain to set up and use in Linux in the past.
So yeah, it's come a LONG way since last time I installed it as my desktop OS. Before, I'd get frustrated from being unable to do a task that is easily accomplished in Windows, and eventually switch back. I don't think I'll need to do that this time around.
(* - you have to jump through a few hoops to get something as simple as mp3 playback support in Fedora)
I guess this has drifted a little off-topic, but what the heck.
