What are the Real Differences Between Distributions?

toblak asks: "Everybody seems to say the Mandrake is a good distro for newbies and Gentoo, Debian, SUSE, etc, are for the Power Users. Other than different updating schemes, when you get 'under the hood' of the distribution isn't it basically the same? If I compile some source code on a Debian system don't I get the same functionality as I would if I compiled the same code on a Mandrake system? I've been using Mandrake for about a year and while I don't consider myself a newbie, I'm not a Power User either. Have I been 'missing out' on something by staying with Mandrake?"

Comments

Re:Let's not forget a few things

[0x0d0a]

This whole "gentoo runs faster" bit is, frankly, bogus.

(a) all the major distros ship multiple versions of crucial stuff like the kernel and glibc, where the cycles actually matter.
(b) At one point, I flipped the optflags to build for my processor and rebuilt everything significant in my RH install at the time from SRPMS. Reinstalled. No significant speed improvements.