I just logged into Slashdot using Facebook. I've had a Slashdot account for years but was just too lazy to type in my password so went for the one-click alternative. ;)

Not to get into religious battles but I'm talking improvements, not changes. There's will *always* and *forever* be room for improvements. Like verifying files for possible tampering, to managing backups of configs, to providing integrated snapshots, to "self-healing" features in case kernel update goes awry (zypper keeps x number of kernels installed, apt-get just keeps piling them on - annoying if you have smallish /boot partition) I used Ubuntu for years rigorously, often delving deep into dpkg functionality. I would say there is some room for improvement.

Right! Just about everything open source is some form of beta or another. Oh, and I'm no fan of virtual machines. The installer has no business touching partitions it was told not to touch, on drives not used for the install. There are bugs that are understandable, typos or errors in judgement, then there are bugs that clearly show the programmer has no idea WTF they are doing. This was the latter.

I started with Slackware as well - well, actually, the original dual floppy release, then self-managed HD install for a bit. After OpenSuSE, I tried a couple others like Mandrake, Knoppix, handful of others. Eventually found Ubuntu, which seemed like the very first Linux distro which someone began to really hammer down all the rough edges, enforce some harmony on Linux desktop. Well, mainly, no more eye-stabbingly ugly apps hardcoded 24pt X11 fonts. They were (and are) still there, just not part of the default environment.

You're right. I should have mentioned apt/dpkg (Ubuntu) vs. yum/rpm (Fedora) and zypper/rpm (OpenSuSE) but the core RPM tool seems more robust when you need to trace down why an app isn't starting up (dependency problems) or determine whether files have been tampered with. Although leaving Ubuntu coincides with buying a faster machine, it seems zypper/rpm is much faster than apt/dpkg, which could take hours to install (NOT including initial downloading). zypper/rpm has various options for how updates are performed (one file at a time, in small batches or after fully downloaded) among other options.

A beta of Fedora 18's installer completely wiped my hard drive. I told it to partition the drive. It partitioned it, installed Linux fine, and ALSO formatted every NTFS partition to a fresh EXT4. Even for a beta, this is a sign there's something seriously wrong. After using SuSE for years, then Ubuntu for years, then a very brief love affair with Fedora 17 KDE (mainly, delta RPM updates), I returned to OpenSuSE after 10 years away and probably will never switch away again. As far as integrated admin tools and the installer, OpenSuSE's have always been exceptional. Also, my reason for switching from DEB to RPM-based distro was it seems Debian's core package management tools haven't seemed to evolve much in years while RPM appears to have improved quite a bit. The delta-compressed updates is a huge deal for me, but also the general speed of the tools. OpenSuSE's zypper tool also gives a bit of freedom in installing 'unmatched' later versions of libs but if things go wrong, it's easy to trace and downgrade. Also, the package management tools integrate with btrfs snapshots and there's a powerful tool called 'snapper' which gives you quick access to rollback or version diffs.