I've been having trouble trying to figure out what Distro to stick with.

I stared with Redhat 7x when I signed up for the class in College. I was instantly hooked. From that point on I made sure I had at least one linux partition in my system.

Later on, I decided to try other distro's. I tried Lycoris next, and loved the way it looked and operated. Unfortuneatly, it wasn't all up to date, although this distro showed promise to getting to the point of being a Windows alternative. Then, I heard that Lycoris was going to initiate a system of "tiral versions" and then start charging for their OS. Well, farewell Lycoris, its been fun.

I decided to try Mandrake next, and I downloaded version 9.1, and I fell in love with it, and was eagerly anticipating 9.2. I waited and waited in my happy world of easy Linux computing and absolute fun with my computer, when I read all the horror stories of 9.2 and decided not to go with it.

Realizing that Mandrake wouldn't be that stable of an OS, after all the bugs, I decided to go back to Redhat, so I installed RH9 and was happy.
I then was eagerly anticipating Redhat 10, knowing that I could always count on Redhat to put out a stable distro.

I was wrong, as two weeks later they pulled the plug on Redhat and gave it to Fedora. At this point I was infuriated, no Linux distro left I could count on, and I was then scared I was stuck with Windows forever.

What I need is a Linux distro I can ACTUALLY count on.
Something that will put out a good version thats stable.

I need with my Distro the following:
1. It has to have the latest Gnome or latest KDE
2. It has to look halfway decent
3. It must support WMV, AVI and DVD's (MP3's too)
4. It has to have a CD-burner as easy as nero to operate
5. Its gotta be fun like Mandrake is
6. It must be fast, to date all Linux distro's I tried are all slow

With that said, I need reccomendations. Currently I am using Fedora and I love it, however I am scared to trust it. It could go the way of $ or die out, and I don't want to trust it unless I can be assured it will always be there for me to count on.

why don't you try Gentoo ... it's fast, and you don't get a bunch of crap you will never use with it... what is there, you put there. And it has everything you want in your list there, plus some

or Slackware - see above.

Did you try Slackware, and did you customize to fit your needs, or did you just use the default install to make your claim??
Slack is not slow at all, even on my P3 850 mhz box.

I'll 3rd slack for speed.

Well, there are many distros to choose from, and it will be your choice only. Why not check in the Linux-Distribution Forum. Slackware has been around for awhile, same as gentoo, debian, etc. Or you can check out this site:
http://distrowatch.com/

Good luck in finding the one you can stick with for awhile.

Thanks guys, Gentoo seems like the winner so far, but I haven't yet made that decision.

Can those of you that use Gentoo post what the good and bad parts of it are? And also for Slackware?

Also did that Slackware site have screenshots?

And BTW, when I install Linux I only install what I need.

the good points of Gentoo would be that it's fast, always up to date, good looking, and everything is built for your system. Bad point would be the install takes a long time, and it's all text mode. But after it's all installed, it is completely worth it. Slackware is also a good choice if you want to get your system up and running really fast and want a really reliable, and powerful operating system.

I was also hesatent about trying mandrake 9.2 from what I heard, but I installed it thursday and It's pretty good, just configure urpmi for your sources and update and it's running pretty good.Just got a couple of small things to tweak but it's worth a try.
I also am going to try slack and debian, but wanted to let you know that Mandrake is not that bad I like it better than mandrake 8.2.