Having had some further problems with CentOS, and having also got home from work especially early this evening, I decided I would take the opportunity to install Fedora in place of CentOS. Well, I had some problems with it accepting the current partitioning, and thought maybe if I abandoned that it would sort things.
Only it didn't. It crashed, repeatably, at "Setting up installation environment" shortly after starting to reformat the entire hard disk. (I hope to hell the backup of my filespace I performed just beforehand worked!) Which means I have no working computer at all now. (The only reason I'm able to post this is because I took the precaution of bringing home my work laptop in case I needed to check things online during the early stages of the installation process.)
So it looks like my fourteen-year relationship with Red Hat is coming to an end (except professionally). What Linux distro would you recommend I switch to instead?