Planning on moving to a harder linux

So far, I've come a long way with Ubuntu, but although Ubuntu is a full featured Linux I've been finding that Package Managers and GUIs actually hinder my learning in the sense that I've become lazy and only look at the package manager to resolve most of my issues.

I find that whatever I do in the command line is someone else's work and I simply cut and paste their solutions in my terminal and let 'er rip.

I think its time I got the coding Zen under control. So soon, I will take my faithfully never re-installed laptop (in continuous dirty upgrade state from 8.04) and rip to down to install the latest version or either Arch, Slackware or Gentoo. I've pretty much settled on Arch but it all seems so arbitrary at this point seeing as I've never hacked a proper command line Linux into existence. Sounds like I'm going to spend quite a few night wide awake breaking this sucker.

Masochism maybe... but who cares. Real men know how to use a command line.

Quick Moblin Review

I took Moblin 2.1 for a test drive on my AA1 a couple of days ago. There are a few positives; the interface is very fast on low powered machines. It presents a coherent desktop, and everything is included with the basic distro.

So no requirement to install proprietary codecs. Things like flash and mp3s work out of the box which is great for Linux newbies.

Tired:

No easy way to install new applications, another Linux distro that perhaps unconsciously pretends its not Linux. No immediate knowledge of how to install new applications, one gets the idea that Moblin is that final product.

Final verdict, good OS for a smartphone but limited even by netbook standards.