Yes - I agree this felt like flame-bait. I found the absence of any references to Debian odd. I say that because for me the choice among Linux distributions is

Yes - I agree this felt like flame-bait. I found the absence of any references to Debian odd. I say that because for me the choice among Linux distributions is largely a choice of what kind of package management you want to use. One thing I related to in the article was the reference to the early days of trying Linux: "I think the first version of Linux I ever tried was from some CD's I found in a magazine back in the mid to late 90's, I think it was version 5 of Redhat." I like Ubuntu because I have always been more comfortable with dpkg/apt than rpm/yum. I have come to like yum alot more and find CentOS to be a fine choice for servers. My fondness for Debian is not rational though. It was the first distribution I successfully used. Something just clicked - the install worked, the documentation made sense, apt worked pretty well. I have dabbled with Gentoo and Slackware and can see the attraction of source based installing. Ditto with NetBSD and pkgsrc. But Debian was my "first"...