Actually, I find all discussions concerning the relative merits of each distro a bit misleading. I have not yet installed a Linux distribution that did not require a lot of tweaking, and I've tried a lot of them -- Slackware, TurboLinux, SpectraLinux, Suse and Caldera (before it went over to the Dark Side). Not one worked the way I wanted it to, on first boot, after installation. I remember way back in 1996, when I tried Slackware for the first time, and it took me 3 months to get it setup just the way I wanted it. Of course, now it takes me a much shorter time to get Linux to a "productive" state, but there is still a ton of tweaking -- that hasn't changed. You only have to look at Stanton Finley's guide to installing Fedora to see that this is not restricted to my experience. That's not necessarily a bad thing. I got my start in UNIX on Solaris, and the one thing that I miss in Solaris is the incredible flexibility of Linux. Certainly, Solaris can be tweaked -- as can that Other OS from Redmond -- but not to the extent that Linux can. This makes Linux suffer in terms of usability -- if you were just getting started in Linux (any distro, it does not matter), it can be daunting to get everything setup just right, and there will be niggling problems. All distros have their own peculiar little problems and quirks -- I'd be surprised, and suspicious, if Ubuntu did not have any. The good thing about Linux is that, when problems come up, the community will come up with ways to either solve the problem or work around it. What some reviewers see as complexity and usability issues, I see as opportunity and flexibility. To say that one distribution is better than another is, I think, misleading to new users because it raises false expectations -- better to tell them that they need to be willing to put in their share of effort and be prepared to do more than just click the "Next" button. This way, they won't be disappointed and start to say that something "sucks". Anyway, just my 2 cents... Regards, pascal
