I have Fedora core 6. I downloaded 9 but I haven't seen any reason to upgrade.
I like fedora... It is quick and stable and I can ssh into my machine from anywhere...
I used redhat before Fedora. It had an rpm based system too. Using rpm's can sometimes get hairy. Sometimes you can't update software because everything is linked together and once you start installing source code things get out of whack because the rpm system won't recognize the source code as being installed. You pretty much have to stick to using the "yum" command to install updates if you don't want to screw things up. I haven't done that and I've managed to keep things somewhat straight. I am actually surprised I've avoided a upgrading from FC6 for all these years.
This is how mine looks (generic like the fc9 shots):
I have all transparent terminals too
Pretty geeky but I like it!