I discovered this forum a few months ago and was really impressed. I've been lurking off and on since then, to see if I wanted to become a part of the community.

I noticed that lots of you have use distros like Arch, Gentoo, Slackware, and Crux with very minimal software. I've used Arch before, but simply use Ubuntu (moderately modified to suit my preferences and needs). From my experience, communities full of "advanced" users tend to be rather hateful toward people who use easy software, so I've been wary of posting here. You might think that people who like easy to use software don't belong here since they don't really want to learn about *nix. Personally, I feel that I am greatly interested in Unix systems, even though I can't bring myself to use an "advanced" or "minimal" setup for long without compromising my productivity. I may use Ubuntu, but I still like clever hacks, the command line, shell scripts, Vim and Emacs, and such things.

Despite some misgivings, I decided that you all seem nice enough. So I'm taking the plunge, and hope to become more than just a lurker. Nice to meet you all!