Everyone seems like Ubuntu/Kubuntu and a few others, so I hope to be to try one of those, or Fedora 12 of course, soon.
Fedora has always been free. You could probably pay for extended support, but I’m not aware of it. But being a free product, support cycles are very short.
RHEL is the pay for product. I’m not even sure it qualifies as a traditional distribution. It’s an enterprise product.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux. With 7 year support.
The strings are clearly there with fedora. You use the free product, you are a guinea pig of sorts.(which bothers me not one bit)
If anything, that’s a good thing in my book. They are willing to sink money(programming time) into fixing bugs.
These may help clear some things up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedora_(operating_system)
I rarely trust Wiki, but for software I’m sure they’ve gotten it largely correct. Seems so at first glance.
But in any case, nothing wrong with the many others recommended. No worries.