Now that I have been running Fedora 7 for a while I'm beginning to see its strengths and weaknesses.
One area that worries me slightly is what seems to be the 'normal' way of keeping it up to date which is to run 'yum update all' (or an equivalent) automatically at regular intervals.
Most of the time this works fairly smoothly but every so often there is a hiccough and you see as a result hundreds of messages in the Fedora mailing lists saying "it's broken".
For me one of the major disadvantages of this approach is that when the kernel gets updated (which is quite frequently) I have to recompile both my Nvidia display drivers and Vmware. The Vmware recompile can be a bit difficult as Vmware is only guaranteed to build against certain kernel versions and you often have to use third-party patches to get it to compile with more recent kernels.
So I don't update all the time now, at least not the kernel.
I'm wondering if there is a 'happy medium' somewhere between Slackware which was very conservative and stable (only went to a 2.6 kernal just recently) and Fedora which seems a bit frantically on the bleeding edge.
Is there a distribution which offers pretty close to latest versions of everything when it releases but then just maintains things with only security updates and such until the next release?
General requirements are:-
Not too "GUI and Windows oriented", Fedora is definitely as far as I'd want to go in this direction.
A reasonably good package management utility, Fedora's yum makes life a lot easier than Slackware.
I run FVWM2 as my window manager so any distribution that makes it difficult to do this is out!
Must run Vmware fairly smoothly, I think most probably will, Slackware was slightly messy because of its different initialisation script structure.
Vmware is important to me as I need MS Access to run our company's accounts. Running them via Vmware on my desktop is just *so* much nicer than running on a separate machine that I'll never go back. It's all well backed up and, if the Linux/Vmware goes completely pear shaped I could easily enough just put them on a dedicated machine so absolute reliability of Vmware isn't necessary.