On Dec 19, 2003, at 10:26 PM, Micah DesJardins wrote:

> If any of you are using Debian, Gentoo or Open or Free BSD, could you 
> tell me what things you like about them?  I'm currently booting 
> straight into X, which is probably for the best since I do a lot of 
> browsing. I just open a lot of terminal windows and go to it.   I've 
> tried KDE in the past and haven't really been sold on it ,so this time 
> I went GNOME and well, I've not switched back to KDE so I suppose that 
> says something.  What is your preferred Window manager and why?

I've actually tried 3 versions of Linux, (5 if you count Red Hat, 
Yellow Dog and Fedora as different) 3 versions of BSD and a few 
versions of Windows. I've also dabbled in CP/M, VMS and some obscure 
versions of CDC and IBM OSes. The only universal is that nobody really 
likes Windows to the point where they actually enjoy messing around 
with computers.

My conclusion is that the differences between *nix versions don't 
matter very much. Discussion like this one tend to be a lot of fun as 
everybody weighs in to defend their favorite and the differences get 
magnified. The truth is that anyone who is competent in any version of 
*nix can sit down in front of any other version of *nix and get useful 
work done. They are all converging. You can pretty much find every 
package manager on every system.

For me, any system with zsh is *way* better than any system with bash. 
I literally get so frustrated with bash that I can't get work done. 
I've taken to carrying around a cd with the latest zsh tarball so that 
I can install it on any system I might have to use. Yet most people 
seem fine with bash. It's just a matter of personal preference. What's 
right for me may suck for you.