I just installed Red Hat 6.1 not too long ago on my laptop. I think it's a
wonderful OS and plan on building a Linux server instead of a Win32 server.
I'm quite happy with Star Office and I am also running JBuilder 3.5 for Java
development. I agree that Emacs is a little too unfriendly. Most C/C++ programmers
are going to prefer a Visual C++ type environment; unfortunately there is
nothing comparable for Linux. The fully Java powered JBuilder is pretty good
on Linux for Java people though.