On the topic of society being competitve & trashing others:
One of the universal truths is that stupidity & bigotry is not bound by any age, language, locale, sex, race, religion, creed, political ideology, size, shape, color, weight, etc. This truth also applies to such topics as import vs domestic cars, sports teams, OSs, immigration, CPU chips, video game platforms, programming languages, etc. A corallary to this truth is that most people can not acurately compare & contrast their topic/product without insulting & trashing a competitor topic/product. These two concepts are most often found in individuals who have low self-esteem & feel the need to just belong to something or anything. These people use the anonymity & the power of the Internet to spread their message of hate and intolerance in order to justify their new found "self worth".

On that fast rising distro:
If the distro in question is mepis, then my personal experience is only with the live CD that was released within the last 30 days. I did notice some things. The mepis is made up of Free & Open Source software, but the distro as a whole is not under a Free or Open Source license. See http://os.newsforge.com/comments.pl?...2205&sid=42176. It looks like mepis is distributing RelaPlayer which is not free for all distribution. If it was, then Knoppix would have RealPlayer too. The mepis license is for non-commercial use only and may be ditributed for non-commercial use. This is because one of the administrative GUI packages is under a restrictive license similar to how Suse's YAST was under a restrictive license (now a GPL license). The author of the mepis admin GUI is free to license it as he sees fit. I am free to complain about it because I am not permitted to use mepis at my job nor can I make copies and give it away like I give away Knoppix. The other mepis issue (which I have not verified or have absolute proof) is with their wireless support. Many people have noticed that mepis has better wireless device support as compared to other distros. I have found forum postings where some people suspect that they may be distributing binary wireless drivers outside of the driver's license agreements.

On using many distros:
I love using many distros & have become distro independent. I have used probably 30 plus distros and now use about 10 to do my job, hobbies, and volunteer work. Off the top of my head I use:
RedHat ES/AS 2.1 & 3.0
Fedora Core 2 & 3
Suse SLES 8 x86/x86-64, 9 x86/x86-64
Suse 9.x Pro
Knoppix
Debian
Gentoo
IPCop
CensorNet