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Topic: what distros have what advantages?
Very clever! this is a good way to get around the "what's the best distro?" dilemma. Ask that and you might as well never read the replies! phrased this way though, you might get a lot of good answers!
May i say, i have tried red hat 7.0, mandrake 8.0 and 8.2, and turbolinux 6.1
turbolinux was a little bit different from the others, and i never got to play with it for long. It comes with a few different packages and is mainly aimed at businesses in Australasia, particularly Japan, China, New Zealand and Australia. It was okay, might throw you for a minute if you've been red hatting though.
mandrake. 8.0 was a bitch to set up on my laptop, just like red hat 7.0, but when working they both acted as expected. Red hat and mandrake are very similar to one another, maybe having a different "feel". Some glitches and bugs in these systems can probably be attributed to hardware. In red hat 7.0 i had to use GNOME due to mouse problems in KDE.
Mandrake 8.2, what i am using now. If i use GNOME (1,4) i get those exact same mouse problems! KDE 2.4 is okay though (still a glitch or two though, same ones, i suspect buggy hardware), XFce which i hadn't used before is excellent and glitchless. Mucho packages come free with both red hat and mandrake. XBill is notable by it's absence, in Mandrake, also, mandrake irritatingly does not install "make" by default unless you select "developer tools" during install, and does not install pine by default at all! (even though it's on the CD!) why? it's necessary! again, mucho free programs, bluefish, many text editors, media players and cd recorder frontends. several versions of emacs and vi included.
That's my thoughts on distros/features...