From my first attempt to use computer as a child, i followed IT development from eyes of MS OS's platform. I started on MS-DOS with nice blue classic file manager which was my first master and teacher. Those of you who know, keep remembering, those of you who don't, don't worry :>. Then I jumped over Windows 95 (I don't know where the hell was 3.11, I never put my hands on it...), then 98, 2000 and finally XP. In 2002 I tried my first Linux distribution and I choose Mandrake (now Mandriva), just because it was easiest for Windows users at those times. Of course I didn't like it and returned back to Windows 2000/XP, although I couldn't sleep well since then. After few years I settled myself on Ubuntu and finally moved all my stuff there and made it primary OS. It was back in late 2005 and since then I never moved back to MS world. MS Windows was transformed from my OS of choice to OS that I would recommend for my parents/grandparents or no-IT oriented friends. For myself, I wanted something more scalable, free, better performance... let's cut that here, you know that stuff. So my story begins on Ubuntu. Ubuntu was my OS of choice for about 1 year. I also tried Kubuntu - Ubuntu with KDE environment. I like KDE, but KDE is not so well supported than Gnome in Ubuntu. Great experience, but, there was one but. I didn't feel keen enough, running Ubuntu. I was showing sings of silent envy on Gentoo and Debian guys who have OS's that were so "cool", they could configure and manage their distributions to almost crazy details and squeeze more performance from their machines on their hard-core distributions. I started to feel lame on Ubuntu and when I saw postings on some forums that said: "Ubuntu is for users to learn how linux works and for real men, there is Debian". So I moved to Debian as real men, and as real men, I struggled with it for about 1 year to get at least 80% functionality that I had on Ubuntu. Sure, my OS was stable, hell-fast and I felt great, that I can push my machine in terms of performance. Yes, Debian IS more stable and is also faster than Ubuntu, when you know how to configure it right. But the major drawback for me was ease of use. On Debian, I found myself playing with OS much more than on Ubuntu. And from end-user point of view, honestly, things are not working so well and smoothly as they are working on Ubuntu. So I ended up moving all my stuff back to Ubuntu and I promised myself - never dig again into hard-core OS's. Not because they are bad, I'm pretty sure they are great, but because digging into keen OS's took me great deal of my time, that I could spend much better. OS's isn't related to my career focus and never will be. I learned a lot about OS's for these years and that counts for something (I hope), but it is enough for now. I'm staying with easy to use distributions for years to come. PS: My choice of Ubuntu as distribution for day-to-day use is random. I consider Ubuntu in equal relationship with other distributions on same level - OpenSUSE, Mandriva and maybe Fedora. Ubuntu is not superior to them, or in other words - I'm not trying to follow Ubuntu hype.