Just thought I'd mention why I care about such things. As a fairly high-end kind of user and one who sometimes oversees development projects, I want to be in touch with trends and I want to be using a system that is reasonably popular, future-oriented and that works well. Right now it looks to me like Linux is the best OS for me to be working on (I used to work mostly on Solaris). What will the future bring? I'm not sure, so I try to keep my eyes on the horizon in case something important is coming along. The user experience is determined mostly by the programs the user is using, including the shell, and this can be moved from one UNIXy OS to another. I think bash and GNU utils are the way to go right now. They work well and are widely used (by contrast Solaris has had a few really buggy or inefficient utils). I used tcsh for years but am switching to bash because, while only slightly better overall (I think), it is becoming more widely used that tcsh. Unless I'm missing something, kernel features don't seem to have a great impact on user experience, but it is essential that the kernel is stable and doesn't crash. Until FreeBSD is giving me something that I really care about that Linux can't give me, I'm not going to move away from Linux. Why would I? Today I'm not seeing a reason to study FreeBSD further. Maybe that will change someday. Mike