Redhat was the first version of Linux I ever set my hands on. For a newbie it was extremely easy to use and friendly (except for its inability to detect certain graphic cards).
However towards the end, I had great trouble downloading the ISO’s from redhat After spending sleepless nights, it was a disappointment to see checksum errors again and again and again till I was convinced that Red Hat was more interested in selling their paid software and were probably discouraging download. I was very disappointed and started searching for a version of Linux that would be really free and not go the way of Redhat and Star Office.
Although I miss Redhat very much, I didn’t bother to try out Fedora even after getting it free on cd. I just dont want to use software that will suddenly turned paid again... Currently I use Debian which is not all that user friendly and is more of a do it yourself project but still works good.