For my own personal servers and workstations, yeah either way works pretty well. But when you have several hundred servers with a variety of different applicat

For my own personal servers and workstations, yeah either way works pretty well. But when you have several hundred servers with a variety of different applications, many of which you don't use at all but you still need to keep patched and up to date, having a distribution helps a lot. I curse the guys at CSW all the time (eg up and changing config directories from /opt/csw/etc to /etc/opt/csw[1]) but they have probably saved me quite a bit of work testing and building packages. [1]For the record, I think /etc/opt/csw is better, just not better enough to be worth all the hassle of changing.