So, after years of using Debian, I am trying to learn the Red Hat way.
I still have all those machines at home happily running Debian, but the computer allocated for me at work has video chips and ethernet chips that are not in any of the stock installable debian kernels, or XFree packages, so I popped in the RedHat 8.0 CD here at work, and, voila, everything autodetected and is supported. I guess that's why RedHat's stuff has so many patches.
So, that and the fact that every other person here uses Redhat has made decide to better my RedHat skills and stick with this set-up for now.
So, first thing I noticed is how limiting Metacity is as a window manager. Yes, I've read all the gnome-devel lists about how confusing it is to operate a desktop, so that's why the gnome2 environment is so dumbed down. But, still... I can raise a window with a mouse click, but cannot lower it at all?
Metacity "lower" patches here. http://david.cdk.com/~dkaiser/metacity