I think I was very young when I had a multi-page argument on a Maktoob forum with a user whose handle I have lost (something like linux-jordan or linux_jordan) about whether Mandrake or Slackware was the more serious distribution for an Arab teenager learning Unix on a hand-me-down Pentium III. He was for Slackware. I was for Mandrake, on the basis, which I would now consider correct, that a fifteen-year-old in a city without a single user group benefits more from a distribution that at least tries to bootstrap him into a working desktop than from one that requires him to write his own rc.d scripts. He called me, I believe, a muqallid (an imitator) for not configuring my own kernel. I called him, I think, something less printable.