David> ... unless you have experience with Red Hat
  David> and know never to use a x.0 release you tend
  David> to expect it to work, which when it does notit
  David> tends to give people bad experiences.

I've been using Red Hat since about 5.1 (before that
about 15 years of more traditional commercial Unices),
and was well aware of the caveats. However, I needed
some things that are in 8.0, and also know that 8.0
would undo a Very Bad Booboo I made a couple of months
ago (my fault) wherein I wiped out a whole directory
tree of libraries, which proved to be too complicated
to fix completely by other means. (And I don't have a
whole lot of time available these days for tinkering
with the system, which makes this weekend's problems
all the more irksome.) Upgrading did, in fact, fix the
missing library brokenness.

However, I was at 7.2 (never did 7.3), and all the
reviews I'd read gave 8.0 a solid rating, so I took a
chance and tried it. Judging from the excessive
proportion of fluff verbiage in the reviews I read
("cool!" "... this rocks!", etc.), the ones I read may
have been submitted mainly by newbie-kids and users
looking for Windows replacements. My dilemma serves me
right for paying attention.

Now I have to find a way to live with it and use the
environment I've made for myself to make a living in
for the next couple of months, since I'm out of play
time.

-- 
Lynn David Newton
Phoenix, AZ