Ok, hopefully this will not set off a flame war :) Basically my experience with ubuntu has been that when it works right and you stay in the lines, it's great. Fixing problems or doing something unorthodox occasionally involves a touch of smoke and mirrors. Just for fun I thought I would give regular Debian a try. I just installed Debian on another machine. It's in the process of upgrading to "testing". I thought the documentation for Debian was very straight-forward, but perhaps scary to the text-file phobic, but that's where I always ended up in Ubuntu. Questions: - is that an accurate debian / ubuntu difference, what else is there? Basically the only sense i've gotten is that ubuntu is friendly, debian is balanced(?) and gentoo is for freaks. I kid. - is testing a good choice? From the description I am expecting current, but not bleeding edge packages and a machine that is unlikely to blow up. - will it be "easier" to do a machine based on compile-installs etc and not just relying on apt-get with debian than ubuntu. So therefore might it be easier to transition to a realtime machine. For my purposes edgy's 18ish kernel hasn't failed me yet, but hey. wow that turned out to be long but it's some stuff I'd been curious about.