With all this [noob]untu and RPM/APT/whatever talk, I thought it might be nice to remember one of the things we like the most about UNIX in general, and one of the things Linux is better at that just about any UNIX-variant. Choice (see Subject:). One of my earliest memories of UNIX was when a co-worker showed me the man page for the seemingly unobtrusive 'ls' command. Coming from DOS, I was told that 'ls' is the UNIX equivalent of 'dir', but while 'dir' has three or four commandline options, 'ls' had over 20. That might seem more like robustness than choice, but it means you can display the files in a directory many, many, many more ways. Fun thing is 'ls' has evolved even MORE since then. There are currently too many Linux distributions to count. Seriously, I just tried to get a rough estimate and I'm just not willing to count that high. I can't even say if it's hundreds or THOUSANDS. Sure, there are only about 10 'major' distributions, but that's still fairly high. And again, it affords us a crazy amount of choice. One can install Linux on anything from a cellphone or tablet to a super computer. Each of those will work in a wildly different way, but it's very likely that all of them can, in some way, run 'ls' (; One could install and use Linux right now without ever using the commandline. Counterwise, one can install and use Linux right now without ever seeing a GUI. Most of us Power Users/Geeks use both! We can still our email with [al]pine, or Evolution, or kmail. We can browse the web with Firefox, chrome or hell, Lynx! We can open a terminal (and use various different shells) to manage our files, or we can run one of a dozen GUI-based file managers. And we can use all of these at the same time, if we want to. Linux is no longer just a strange, often-mispronounced operating system that hobbyists play with over the weekend. for years, the holy grail of Linux was "Linux on the Desktop" that "noobs" could use. We have that now! And we didn't have to give up the enthusiast portion! Take that, Apple! Take that, DOS! Hell, take that the home computer market in general! Linux is big. It's a big, wide, vast sea of choices. There's room enough in it for every possible usage. and, more importantly, there's a PLACE in it for every way people use Linux now, and every way people will use Linux in the future (*cough*cyborgs*cough*). In closing, I think we should all take a note from the ubiquitous posters hanging up at work, and Celebrate Diversity. -Yaron -- /we now return you to your regularly scheduled program