Starting tomorrow I will be beginning a new job and will be primarily working on Linux servers. Company uses various distros for the servers but primarily are Red Hat, as is my training. I am debating what distro to use on my workstation but am having a dilemma. I do not want to need to do clean installs every few months but I am leaning toward using Fedora to be up to date and to have a decent selection of software. It will be on a laptop so compatibility is key. The company allows for any distro to be used. I sort of considered Debian on the testing repos to be current but yet stable but am unsure. Linux Mint may be an option as well since I use it on my home laptop.

To those who use Linux at work what distro do you use or what would you recommend? I am still semi new to Linux, but not brand new, and do not want to spend all my time on configuring every last thing.

Why would you need to do a clean install every few months? Fedora has FedUp for in-place upgrades

Was not aware of that as I have not looked at Fedora in a long time. Thanks for that information, I was thinking Fedora with the MATE desktop environment.

I use mainly Red Hat and Ubuntu at work, and Mint at home. If you want to keep your workstation as close to Red Hat as possible, Fedora is your best bet. Next would be any http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions#RPM-based distro over debian-based distros. But you can customize your home system so much that it's seriously not much of a leap from one to the other.* Default for Red Hat is Gnome desktop, KDE is widely used too. If you like MATE, the impression I have is that it's less supported under Red Hat, but there is a whole Fedora-MATE community.

As Defron said. Most distributions will have in-place upgrade systems, though they may handle things differently (one of the big things I prefer about Mint over Ubuntu).

*Heck, I even run Windows 7 (with the right utilities) to do a lot of stuff on linux systems, and plenty of my coworkers use macs because the systems interact almost seamlessly with each other.