Interesingly, the "'apt-get install foo' and it just works!" aspect of Debian-like distros was what initially got me hooked, but has since become the bane of my

Interesingly, the "'apt-get install foo' and it just works!" aspect of Debian-like distros was what initially got me hooked, but has since become the bane of my existence. Debian has a policy of shipping a sane default config, and generally enables/launches services for you. This is friggin awesome when you're experimenting and learning. apt-get install nginx, and bam, running webserver. Unfortunately you then start automating processes, and it becomes quite painful. Wanna build a MySQL host with a non-default size innodb log? You get to install the package, stop the service, reconfigure mysql, blow away the log files created when the service was started by dpkg, then start the service back up. Compare this with RHEL/CentOS/Arch: Install package, configure service, start service. These are 3 discrete operations. (Yes, there are workarounds for this, such as using policy-rc.d, but they bring their own complexity to the table.)