It seems to me to boil down to how a person relates to
the distros maintenance facilits in the end. And package
management of course.

I like the way debconf dosen't try to take over from
me. If i want to utilise it as a service, i may, but
there is no insistence to do this.

I also like the flat nature of debs packaging system.
Rather than having everything in mysterious binary data
base files. A package is basically an "ar" archive anyway,
and so, it's not hard to access directly.

Back porting, also, is trivial. Otherwise there
all the same really. Perhaps, differeing in the
init technique, and the patch level of the kernel (RedHat).

Knoppix, like other debs, seem to go with this user
rules policy. Which is good.

Personally, i find the Magician logo used by
Mandrake a bit childish. And the "lets be a windows
clone" attemp, as made by the major distros, to be a
bit of a sell out. So, i just don't trust their
competence/integrity, just for those reasons.

jm