It was a washout.
While I had no trouble doing it for myself, there were lots of problems when it came to serving others. There are too many things I do for other folks which require having OpenOffice.org, multimedia capabilities, printing, etc. So while I’m quite comfortable with the console for my own use, my Kingdom service requires I keep the rest of that stuff on hand.
Having already experienced the sorrows of Lenny’s desktop offerings, I decided to risk trying CentOS again. Maybe the ifconfig got fixed. Either way, I’m running the KDE desktop. It’s tolerable.