unless otherwise noted we're dealing with fedora. it's what i use; i chose it back when it was red hat, because it was the free version of unix developed by a corporation, who superficially seemed to value the user experience. however the biggest influencing factor was perhaps the number of how-to's and tutes that had a section for red hat (now fedora). sure debian and freebsd are mentioned a lot, but they weren't known for characteristics i was looking for when i first chose a flavor.

nowadays fedora has a reputation for including a bleeding edge set of tools, and has a massive community behind it.

i've seen at least one other reference to a stability superstition; some guy swore by the odd numbered releases, i've been partial to even numbered ones myself.

commands are generally noted in bold, and single character keystrokes are in caps for clarity. when a capital keystroke is required, it will be literally preceded with a shift key.