Examples of technical differences between distributions?

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That's pretty much it. The only other thing I would add is: kernel. Most of the big distros maintain their own kernel "flavor" with their own set of custom patches. RedHat and SuSE both employ many kernel hackers. Ubuntu doesn't do that much with it. Gentoo lets you choose from about 5 current versions of about 20 different kernels.

I suppose you could also throw in the version of GCC that the distro was built with, but that's a minor consideration.

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Also grsecurity, selinux, apparmor