I largely agree with your points, but you picked one of the least relevant distros for your example? One of the things I've always liked about SuSE/openSUSE is

I largely agree with your points, but you picked one of the least relevant distros for your example? One of the things I've always liked about SuSE/openSUSE is that it's actually very friendly to people who want to configure at different levels of hands-on versus GUI: the three layers of config files, /etc/sysconfig shell-style configs, and GUI interfaces in Yast are aimed at not stomping on your manual changes (unlike Ubuntu, say) and allowing you to mix & match. The way it works is that config files are checksummed and if the file has changed from stock (or the last version the system touched) it'll disable GUI alterations (which mostly just changes sysconfig and runs the SuSEconfig program to apply changes). The exception to this is when it's a very simple file format (/etc/hosts, say) that has been marked as safe to parse & alter, then it reads in your changed version and presents that as the base. If I want to hack on my postfix configs I can a) use the Yast mail module which'll tweak /etc/sysconfig/{mail,postfix} and automatically run SuSEconfig (and thus /sbin/conf.d/SuSEconfig.postfix). There's no difference here between using the mail or sysconfig GUIs and using emacs on sysconfig files, then running it from the command line. If I then choose to go in and edit /etc/postfix by hand Yast will avoid stomping on my changes with its now-outdated version, but there are backups if I really mess things up and want to revert. For the same reason network config gives you the option to swap from NetworkManager to the old, familiar and entirely happy (for me!) config files in /etc. There are a small number of exceptions, but openSUSE is in my experience about the least aggressive of the Ubuntu/Fedora/openSUSE trio in config lossage while having the widest coverage of default config tools. All this aside and despite having Ubuntu, Debian and openSUSE chroots on my HP TouchPad... I'm trying LFS on it as I write. For something where you really want to explore the architecture and have tight control it rocks!