Hey tech types - picking a Linux distro

[midnight armadillo]

I'm a long time NetBSD user. At my new job I have the choice between Windows XP or Linux + VMWare to run XP for MS Office, the only Windows-only app I'm required to use.

Since VMWare is up to version 4 and Net and FreeBSD don't yet support running it under their Linux emulation, I'm forced to actually run Linux for the first time in like 5 years. WinXP is not a choice ;-)

I am bewildered by the choice of distributions. Don't even get me started on the chaos of devfs vs udev or the choice of like 82 virtual memory schemes in the 2.4 kernel or the difficulties in upgrading to kernel 2.6. There's a good reason why I went to the BSDs years ago! In NetBSD the total system upgrade is done with one command "make build" :-)

The Linux distro I want is: one that'll let me install in a software RAID 1 configuration (not necessary but nice), that supports SATA, and that comes with the XFS filesystem. I'm leaning towards Gentoo for its "Portage" system which resembles the BSD package system. Debian is just too confusing to bother with. Anything else worth looking at? Does the RPM system still suffer from all sorts of fragile dependency problems, or has a distro solved that? The PC is a high end Dell - 3.4 GHz Pentium4, 2 gig RAM, dual SATA IDE disks, nVidia graphics, monster LCD monitor if that makes any difference.

THANKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!