Well I use fedora on my laptop for a few reasons.
Some of the people (network runs on Linux) I work with are big Redhat fans, they've been using it since before time itself (currently have a computer that runs redhat 3.something in the other room).
It's the most likely version of Linux I am going to run into in the "real" world.
So I can know enough redhat specific stuff to answer questions here.
Debian's implimentation of X is to old and crusty to run well on my laptop.
Gentoo is too irritating.
Mandrake is too french.
Suse was next in line after Fedora.
Fedora Core2 is great, and the support for Yum is built in now. Good quality package repositories are starting to pop-up and rpms in general from those places are getting better in quality. (ATrpm, Dag, and Freshrpms are the main third party online repositories that I am aware off).
But mostly because of Yum/Apt support. It's good enough that I expect I can upgrade to Fedora Core3 and upwards when it comes out. Redhat got it's act together when it made Redhat 8.0 and standardized it's stuff. That way with Redhat 8.0 and above you can easily upgrade to any later version using online stuff like you can with Debian. Redhat 7.1 is iffy, and Redhat 6.0 is out of the question, it went thru a major overhaul from 6.0 to 7.0 and it took them till 8.0 to stop f-ing it up. Redhat 7.0 was my first Linux distro and it is probably one of the worst ones ever made (slackware saved me from that horror).
For my desktop I use debian. It's nice to have a OS that outlasts your computer, and harddrives. The current installation of Debian I am using I installed on my last computer after a power outage fried my superblock in ext3 (or could of been ReiserFS) and I lost my entire /etc directory. Since then I've moved it into my current computer, and when I bought my second harddrive I moved it to that one temporarially until I reformated it and put my partitions in a sane order.
As far as were I get my information from?
One word: GOOGLE. One of the best things to ever happen to me. That and experiance. Mostly thru trial and error. Lots of research, lots of just playing around.
I have a lot of misinformation, and a lot of gaps in what I know. But I usually try to find stuff on Google to double check and make sure that I have my facts straight. (doesn't always work)
Unix ---> Internet ---> Linux,
That's the evolution of Linux. The internet is the source of all things Linux, the source of all the documentation, too (unfortunately sometimes). Google, rocks.
Thank god MS never took them over or thought search engines (and the internet) were a good (profitable) idea. After all have you used the search engine/features in microsoft.com? UGGGHH..... If they did that then Linux would be dead right now. (simply because it would be near impossible to find any usefull information about anything)
Facebook
Twitter