Same OS, processor and chipset, two very different worlds

So we have two computers in our living room. The wife and I can both surf the net, or she can watch a movie or TV while I'm doing whatever I do on a computer. I got Sid Meiers pirates for the windows side of the world, and the poor little 5GB partition couldn't load it and have both. I should verify that it is in fact 5 GB, but I mean, egads, windows 98 is only like a few hundred megs, 5 GB for one game, some stuff like Norton and Lavasoft, and windows, we should be able to do a game. Anyways, I had a 40 GB drive in the TV machine, and the wife and I talked it over and decided to swap them. Now I new that we had some extra stuff on the TV machine, like tvtime, xine, some extra drivers and the like, so I set it up. What I didn't realize was the difference between the two. It seems I'm always doing something. like I didn't have usb-printers setup in the Linux kernel. The other one needed the alsa driver for the cheapy 5.1 surround sound card. I'm in the midst of installing java in this one because it never got on the old TV drive. Ack, and I know there's been more. At least Gentoo makes upgrading quite painless, I just do a 'emerge sync' then an 'emerge search java' or a couple emerge searches to find what I want, then a 'emerge whatever' and it's installed with all the proper dependencies. I can also edit /etc/make.conf to make it pick and choose the dependencies correctly so long as whoever added the package to the database set it up correctly. Allot better than the RPM world of SuSE and RedHat I was in before this. Best thing of all is that it's all my wife needs for everything, and it even has Tux Racer for the kiddies ;-)