[ujjwal]

I would agree with you to a certain extent, more emphasis on "choice" rather than "standardisation" may be harming linux on the desktop, but, speaking for myself, I like it that way.

One of my primary distro's, Arch Linux, uses a different device name format. It would have /dev/discs/discX/partY inplace of /dev/hdXY . Longer to type, but a tad more logical. However, I haven't seen a distro use /dev/sdx for IDE hard drives, which one is this?

However, distro's intended at home users, like Fedora, Suse, Mandrake, stick to similiar standards. But when you try lots of distro's you are sure to come across many differences.

Grub/Lilo config's rarely differ in syntax, but they may be created (arranged) differently. However the basic syntax should be the same.

Rarely do GNU/Linux distro's use something other than bash, however, some times, some thing you think is a command, would actually be a program which is executed by the shell. "sudo", "more", "vi", are examples of these. Standard ones like more and vi would be present on almost every distro, but something like sudo may not have been installed. Actually, even very basic things like "ls" are also programs. Type "help" in bash to see a list of the internal commands recognised by the shell. Not too many.

In some cases one would find that there has to be a compromise between ease of use and power, but then among linux distro's, I felt otherwise on trying Vector Linux.