I come from old school UNIX background where AIX, HPUX, SUNOS and other vendors were always referred to as different flavors. Why, because there weren't many choices for GUI’s back then and in some cases the CLI was the only user interface available. So I would say that nowadays the term for various vendors is more appropriately “distributions” and the desktop user experience can be considered a flavor. However there are still many that would consider a distribution as a different flavor. Having said that and assuming we are in agreement on the term “flavor” I must say there are still more than three flavors of Linux out there. I don’t see many references to considering the GUI as a flavor and still see many instances where the different vendors are referred to as “distributions” or flavors.
Here are some links to support what I am saying. Either way I think we are on the same page that there are differences between the “distributions” and the GUI’s available for a given distribution.
Distributions refered to as flavors.
http://www.bellevuelinux.org/flavors.html
http://www.geektimelinux.com/index.php?q=node/view/220
