That's probably accurate.

I hadn't thought of the media part. I don't use CentOS for multimedia (I run it "headless" with VNC so no sound and a bit slow for movies). But your roommate is probably right: CentOS comes without support for mp3's, even, let alone video formats. They're all available from 3rd parties, of course, but not built-in. At least, not as of version 4.6, which I'm using, and which is a bit dated. On the other hand, I don't use Linux for workstations; XP is very smooth for media and stuff and much easier to set up. Ubuntu may be better in that regard; I've tried it but not successfully, and it was way too colorful for me (orange, brown, black - hard on the old eyes!). As for the others, I don't know anything about them. Somersault