I've tried Lycoris, RedHat and Mandrake. Of these, the only one that provides a package that feels like a complete OS, instead of just a bunch of free apps of questionable quality installed by what appears to be a simple batch script. RedHat is the worst with regards to having this polished finished. Lycoris isn't too bad on this front, though it's packaging scheme leaves a lot to be desired. RPMS in general suck. With RedHat you can make use of apt-rpm to help make RPM hell bearable, even though this isn't a directly supported packaging mechanism, since there's an apt-enabled RPM site for RedHat. Lycoris, however, doesn't even have this remedy. Mandrake, on the other hand, has urpmi which works very nicely for about 90% of the software you'll want to install. Further, Mandrake compiles things to the 586 architecture, while the others are still 386, and you can definately see a performance difference. I'm fairly happy with Mandrake as an "out of the box" distribution. Some day I'll want to play with Gentoo just for the raw power involved with a source based distribution system. But I don't have a machine powerful enough to put up with getting a base system installed (rumors of 3 days worth of work for machines like my 300 MhZ box), nor do I feel comfortable enough with configuring Linux systems yet. If someone actually got Gentoo to do a base install as simply as Mandrake does (should be very possible, even though it's a source based distribution, even if this means it's not quite as optimized) I'd probably switch immediately. But such a distro is even less appropriate for Mom and Pop. William E. Kempf