Itch, But No Scratch

I have been running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Workstation on my notebook for two and a half months now. Since the release of RHEL5, Ubuntu 7.04 Fiesty Fawn and Fedora 7 have been released. I kicked around the idea of putting each on bare-metal. Ubuntu 7.04 actually did touch bare metal for all of about one hour before I discovered that it did not work so well when being shutdown -- basically, it corrupted my screen and refused to shutdown. Today, I kicked around the idea of installing Fedora 7 on bare metal, but decided against it. I did not want to go through the pain of trying to get some of my hardware working -- mainly the Intel Pro Wireless 3945abg card I have in my notebook. Which, based on my experience with Fedora Core 6 and atheros cards, is not exactly that bad. But, I did not want to use an outside repository, nor did I want to keep dealing with getting ipw3945 kernel modules each time the kernel was upgraded. With RHEL5, everything I need are on the six CDs. And everything I need after that is from Red Hat's repositories. When something gets upgraded, everything that is dependent on it gets upgraded too. Sure, it would be nice to have Firefox 2.0 and Thunderbird 2.0. Sure, it would be nice to have some fun bleeding edge software. But, I am actually pretty happy with stable (albeit older) software. Everything works. Everything is stable. And I get someone to complain to if something does not work. When my RHEL subscription comes up for renewal next March, I'll re-evaluate if I still need true RHEL or if I can go with CentOS again.  I have a feeling, I'll renew.