I recently had a post saying if I should leave RH9 and use Fedora3. Many people have said yes, so I downloaded F3 yesterday. However, today I asked my linux college professor and asked him if I should switch from RH9 to F3. He said "It's better to use RH9 since its more stable then F3. I recommened RH9."
So, my questions is, is Fedora 3 unstable?

I find it to be just as stable as Red Hat. Wasn't Fedora forked from RH9 anyway?

With Fedora it's like this. Fedora has a short life cycle. That means, that there is a new version every 6 months, and that makes it unstable, because there is just no time to fix the errors. The Fedora project was started by RedHat to make cutting edge technology for linux, which means, they sometimes use the latest versions of software (even beta versions) and putting all of that together, you know what you get if you run a couple of unstable applications on a machine. An unstable machine. I'd go with Slackware for stability, or stay with RH9 (fully updated and patched)...

I use fedora on my home machine for desktop purposes and I don't have an instabilities. FC1 and FC2 had some problems but FC3 has been great. But also as marghorp points out there is a short life span. For something I want completely stable (server use) I would prefer something like Slackware because upgrading to the next version is seamless when you have an auto-updater like swaret. The problem I see with staying with RH9 is that you can't really keep it up to date anymore because there is no more support for it. The last official update for it was probably a year or more ago. Well, you can keep it up to date, but it just takes a lot more work to find what is old and manually upgrade it.

I'll just agree with most of what's been posted. It's actually a very stable system with a short life cycle as explained above. Generally people prefer longer release cycles for servers--in fact that's the main difference between RHEL and FC: the release cycles and future support. In Fedora, it's in terms of months, and in RHEL, it's in terms of years. RHEL is based on the Fedoras though, and I've found RedHat patched kernels to be quite stable in FC and in RHEL in most cases.

Your college professor is wrong because Redhat 9 is an end of line product, so you will not recieve security updates and hence this will result in a system that can be plagued by security issues. If you don't want to use Fedora, try Redhat Enterprise linux (or its clones like CentOS). Personally I think Fedora is good enough for day to day purposes and some companies are even using it on production servers.