You make effort to reduce your wheel spinning.

I have the same Installation at home for my XP3200+ as I had for my Pentium 200MMX.

THIS is why you cannot comprehend Debian. "Freshie" isn't really a good idea.

Debian is all about maintaining what you have and bringing it forward to help you get on with much more profitable things to do.

Without "going into installation mode, booting from CD", can you Upgrade your system from one version of SuSE to another? Remember while still providing services? Without restarting the machine? Without really breaking anything? (maybe a few things got changed and have to be manually edited to comply with the new methods)

How about that. Drew never even noticed the change. His passwords worked, the apache setup worked, etc... I'd be willing to bet you couldn't build a freshie and have it backup with ALL services within an hour, not breaking ANYTHING or forgetting something.