but it appears everyone was too interested in posting their own opinions to check it out, or they read it and ignored it.
This isn't quite on topic and I don't know if this will help
Maybe if you had included something like 'If you're just getting into Linux Red Hat is a great distro to start out on, get version 9 and then check out this tute I wrote which will step you through setting it up.' If anyone was just scanning they would have seen the first line and skipped your whole post.