A Drum Beats In The Distance...

I have, thus far in life, dealt with the following operating system flavors, varieties, distros, whatever you want to call them (in order of my use of them, oldest first)

• CP/M
  
• MS-DOS
  
• Lisa Office System
  
• Mac OS (Classic)
  
• Slackware
  
• OS/2 "Warp"
  
• Caldera (ugh...)
  
• Windows NT 4
  
• Red Hat
  
• SuSE
  
• Mac OS X
  
• Windows 98
  
• Windows 2000 WS/Server
  
• Windows XP
  
• Fedora
  
• Windows Server 2003
  
• Gentoo
  
• Windows Vista (various CTPs)
  
• Ubuntu
  

And I have to say that of all of them, the easiest to set up so far has been...

Ubuntu

No kidding. Considering what you have to do to sysprep/image a windows box; how sucky RPM is in general; how much of a pain in the ass it is to build up a Slackware system in to any kind of decent LAMP box; how long it takes to compile a Gentoo box from scratch (not to mention hand writing all your config files) and finally how totally beholden to Apple you are if you go the OS X route, Ubuntu seems like the right blend for a customized system. I had MythTV (not exactly the simplest piece of software to get running) practically out of the box. It just about boiled down to issuing a sudo apt-get install mythtv command line. Right now I'm installing the prerelease Dapper Drake on a virtual pc. Mark Shuttleworth is cool.