You know this how? I have more than 50 Debian installations. None have Gnome.

Xerox Parc Palo Alto California - miliatary industrial research center

Open Desktop was the first "Windows" in wide release and documentation of it, though Xerox tried to sell their machines earlier (few had the money - kinda like me and those new Apple Servers build in USA i wish i could afford)

THE UNITED STATES AIRFORCE invented the "Start Bar" which microsoft claims they invented, it was in the first release of SCO for i386 X windows as a contribution.

CentOS comes with Gnome as the default and running anything else can really upset it. I assumed that the poster would want the same GUI on both distros. Sorry if this is more than you can cope with.

PS As you see, I have a Debian installation — Xfce, and it took a lot of work to make it usable. And in case you're going to have hissy fit about that claim, I might add that I needed to install from a live disk — probably the plain installer might have been better.

According to a Reddit post:

The famous Alt+F4 sequence comes from the 1987 standard IBM Common User Access, which influenced most keyboard shortcuts which last till today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

2 members found this post helpful.

OP didn't explicitly state applicable OS, but his details say Gentoo, not what I'd call a distro for users accepting of defaults, and particularly not the inflexible Gnome as an affirmative choice. He also says no systemd, which also suggests against Gnome.

My installationS use the NET version of whatever the default Debian installer is at installation time, and include on the command line tasks=standard base-installer/install-recommends=false to avoid the cruft of defaults interfering with usability. I add what I need after the svelte initial installation is complete, which I don't consider to be "a lot of work".

Care to elaborate? All my Debian systems without gnome are very usable without having to do "a lot of work".

Evo2.

This was not for my nice new desktop, but for my IBM laptop that will be celebrating its 20th birthday next year. I needed a proper GUI (window managers are not suitable if you have a system that will need several keyboard drivers) and on such an old computer, that meant Xfce. To make sure that it would indeed work, I needed a live disk. It was a slow install and then, to quote my review at Distrowatch
I assumed that this was an iso put together by one developer in Thailand. I am grateful, but I did rather resent spending a whole afternoon on an installation. But then there's the right way, the wrong way, and the Debian way.

What does the following mean?
The things that were "missing" surely could be installed with a single command like:
Doesn't seem like "a lot of work" to me.

Evo2.

Well, before personal computers (of which IBM's was NOT the first one, though the first one so named), we had things known as terminals. (No, I did not use them, but I have heard feeble old men mentioning such things.. ;-)

Do remember that Linux is a Unix, and that this has been multi-user practically since the first port...

The VIC-20 had function keys labeled F1-F8 a year before the IBM PC was sold.

The old IBM keyboard used PF keys.

Nice, IBM had PF keys in 1972.

"IBM use of function keys dates to the IBM 3270 line of terminals, specifically the IBM 3277 (1972) with 78-key typewriter keyboard or operator console keyboard version, which both featured 12 programmed function (PF) keys in a 3×4 matrix at the right of the keyboard. Later models replaced this with a numeric keypad, and moved the function keys to 24 keys at the top of the keyboard."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_key

50 years ago, and I remember it... am I really this old?