Considering Core 4 - Cons?

Hello all, and thanks for reading my first post here 

I've been a Linux user on and off since 2001, starting out
with Red
Hat, and since using Mandriva, Debian, Gentoo (never quite
succeeding
in installing ;), Kubuntu, Fedora, and now back with
Mandriva.

For awhile now, I've been using Windows 2003 Server on my
desktop box
(still Linux on my working laptop), simply because I needed
proper TV
out on my Radeon (damn ATI for those shaky drivers), the
want to play
games, and the fact that the only existing Linux drivers for
my
Promise Fasttrak SX4000 RAID card are community built ones
for Fedora
Core 4.

I've tried these drivers in the past and verified that they
worked.

I've also grown excessively annoyed with having to eat up
this screwed
up Win2K3 machine's sporadic crashes and regular pukeups, so
I simply
cannot stand to continue having to look at this crappy OS
for very
much longer. On the other hand, I simply cannot stand to
throw my
SX4000 card in the dustbin, as it's a perfectly well
functioning piece
of hardware.

So, knowing that FC4 will work with this hardware, I'm
thinking that
this is the street I need to go down. But, what I'm worried
about,
having *used* Linux for some years now, and also having done
some
development (Ruby (on Rails) mostly), some setting up of
Apache, SVN,
soft raids, etc. is: What is the support for this version?
Will I be
able to, e.g., use the latest KDE? Get the latest Ruby? Get
the latest
Apache? Install the latest squashfs with practically
unlimited volume
size support? Basically, get the latest sweet-sweet without
having to
update the kernel, which has to be a certain version in
order for the
community version of the SX4000 driver to work? Are there
backports?

I'm not so sure here. Please help me out. Once it's set up,
I'll be
setting up a 12*500 GB RAID-10 software array also, and I'd
like not
to have to go back to Windoze afterwards and then have to
reverse that
setup...

Thanks in advance for any input,

Daniel 

PS: A side question: I'll be running it off an old Athlon
processor.
Is there any point in rebuilding packages/kernel to
maximize
performance? I don't know a lot about SRPMS, but I noticed
that you
can download discs of Fedora with SRPMS only - are these
used to
"automagically" build RPM releases for your own
architecture? If so,
any good links to howtos?

Thanks 


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