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As I remember (and pls don't quote me on this :-), RedHat made installing KDE difficult somewhere around 7.2 or so. They supported Gnome. A LOT of people jumped off the RedHat bandwagon and went with other distros because of this. Then there were fewer people like me who went with the "BSDs"....FreeBSD and OpenBSD. I'd been using OpenBSD for firewalls anyway, and FreeBSD for servers, so I decided one weekend (back around FreeBSD 4.3 or so) to try to build a desktop (user) system out of it. It was REMARKABLY easy! "X" was a pain to set up. But I found that the Linux binary compatibility support let me run "amost" ALL Linux programs!....inside of FreeBSD! I can even install packages via RPM if I want to. :-)

This in conjunction with OpenOffice...which lets me open ALL MS documents...and I have NO reason to ever be a Microsoft user again. They simply don't have the only and best way to do things anymore. People just haven't figured it out yet. But they will. :-)

The ONLY major gripe I have with FreeBSD is in the way it handles sound devices. Now and then, I enjoyed playing Enemy Territory. Because of the FreeBSD sound device problem, I couldn't use a TeamSpeak client, and get sound from the Enemy Territory client simultaneously. It was annoying....but since I had an unused on-board sound card, I ended up using the SB card for ET, and the on board for TeamSpeak! When I searched for a solution, and found that I wasn't the only one having this problem, the "general" answer was that we "...shouldn't be using FreeBSD as a user operating system!"... :-)