well i used for a brief time redhat 8 and still keep a knoppix boot disk for who knows when.
the feeling i got was that, from the shell interface, all was running really smoothly; things started to become less friendly with the kind-of-unstable desktop...
during the x86 times it was an adventure to use dos, but then desktops really made my day with clicks faster than typing.
so probably using the shell is really control/security-friendly and fun, but to me desktops seem more modern... or it's just an excuse not to learn a new set of commands.
anyway by chanche the other day there was this article on the "delicious generation" - programs looking really shiny but lacking strong code or advanced-users options.
so it would seem that now there's the linux scenario, microsoft's products and the delicious choice...
