fwiw, rich, there *is* a difference between aptitude and apt-get - aptitude tracks automatically installed dependencies, and apt-get doesn't. That means that if you install a package and it brings along some other packages, when you uninstall using aptitude it will remove the dependencies that were brought along (apt-get remove will not.) The catch is that you have to had used aptitude from the very start

During the closing of my time on ubuntu, i was looking at the KDE apt-get frontend, which was actually a fair bit nicer than Synaptic (which I don't like very much.) The aptitude frontend is nice if you don't want to start up a giant gui app and works nicely over ssh

One of the things i miss most from ubuntu (and look jealously at Gentoo for) is package management tools - Arch's pacman is lacking in a few areas (gentoo eix makes package searches BLAZING fast : pacman -Ss takes for-ever.) You need hacks for coloured output on the terminal, and there's no decent (usable) graphical interfaces

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wrt 98SE : Maybe not so much terrible as ancient - for example, you can only use the FAT32 filesystem, which i can't abide. (NTFS is actually a frackin' awesome filesystem, and if it had an open spec (so we can be sure we got the linux implementations right) then i'd use it for all my partitions.)

Fwiw, linux of the 90's era was pretty nasty too in terms of providing a computing experiecne you could actually use, and let's not even talk about classic Mac OS. (the underpinnings of classic mac os are only slightly less crappy than the 9x series of windows.)

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Finally, an epiphany : I was reading kerneltrap (a digest version of the linux kernel mailing list), and with every point release of the kernel - which happens roughly monthly by my reckoning - they're ripping bits out and replacing them and generally making things better. Put simply, it's awesome just how fast linux development moves and where it's going. Most popular linux software evolves at this rate too. (i updated my entire system before i left uni a month ago, which got me the 2.6.20 kernel. Current version us 2.6.22, and there are pages and pages of changelog.)

OSX has yearly (or so) releases with giant whacks of new features in every one, as well as speed increases (generally) and improvement of all the stuff underneath. (Spaces in OSX 10.5 will bring decent virtual desktops to OSX, which is a prerequisite for any computer i use now).

Windows has this monolithic release cycle (3 years or so) and doesn't really add much worthwhile between releases, yet upgrading between versions of windows tends to break things nearly all the time. OSX upgrades are clean, and so are incremental linux system updates...

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Colophon : i have my own website now, hosted by a real webhosting company. url : lws.nfshost.com. Watch this space.

Suddenlly, i regret had posted this topic, i felt so small in front of all such text !!!!

1) kinda defeats the purpose of buying a MAC
4) don't want a laptop, and I want something that can evolve with technology, not something that I'm stuck with the hardware until I buy a new one. (Most of my customization goes on inside the computer, not through firewire and USB)
5) the part where you said "Mighty mice are still really strange and I hate them"... but you use your M$ mouse... case in point.

I guess what it comes down to is that I don't want to switch and you can argue all day that I should, but my aversion is so great that I don't think it will ever happen

Thanks for the info.  I haven't been able to touch my linux partition in over 4 months due to the kids hogging the computer.  Still more than happy with the G4 PowerBook, though.  My favorite system of the bunch.

Wes, ok if we post a link to your site on the skinyourscreen.com/site site?