Welcome to the Gnomers Jkerr it took a while.
I am a bit skeptical to the dropping of Gnome in Mandriva too.
Gnome does not put any strain on the CPU even with all the blows and whistles from Compiz and Xorg activated. It just is more stable I think.
Centos is a typical Server distro and I use it just for server stuff, but I guess you can make a fairly good desktop out of it - I just never tried. I did with Debian some time ago and that worked just fine.
I met Arch and fell in love. So there is no going back for me now. That thing is rock solid and stable!
This might be only because I am in total control of what I install and there is absolutely no bloat. You will need two PC's to install it: One with the Arch Beginners Guide opened and the one you want to install on.
It will take some time but you will be in control of all the settings - and the Wiki is just great. I am running Gnome and KDE with slim (not gdm) and that thing just works. The KDE update was painless even immediately after its release.
That makes me wonder what all the others are doing with it, because it is stable right out of the box without all that integration stuff that probably brakes things.
Arch is more stable than Fedora IMO. But Fedora is the dynamic force in the Linux world, so it is bleeding edge. Even if it cannot keep up with Arch on the software bit.
Still I kind of like Fedora 14 so far, but I am not able to form a qualified opinion yet. I wrote down
my impressions regarding Fedora 13, somewhere else here and I think that still goes.
I just updated that one (the Fedora 13 install). And I am currently playing with it.
