I don't necessarily agree with that. Red hat is open source so if you are savvy enough you can even make modifications to the Kernel to suit your needs.
The thing to be cautious of here is the availability of drivers for the little players. You may run into problems finding drivers for TV cards, wireless network cards etc. etc. This is why I would stick with the bigger players. Your chances of getting drivers are greater for the flavor that is the most widely used. As of March of 04 Red Hat, SuSe, Mandrake, Debian and Ubuntu were the most widely used distrubtions. Here is the link which supports that. http://www.bellevuelinux.org/operating_systems_list.html
There are way more than three flavors of Linux out there. Caldera, SUSE, Debian, Red Hat, Mandrake, Slackware, LinuxPro, TurboLinux, Corel just to name a few. KDE is not a flavor of Linux per se. Its a Desktop Environment that runs on UNIX and LINUX. Similar to Sun's CDE. It's simply a user interface similar to windows. Meaning menu options and icons on a desktop.
