Those blue cows should stay away from BSD though. That Bovine Spongiform Disease is not a pretty thing.

Imho Blue Arch has a tiny Advantage over Blue Slackware... TINY though..

Arch cows are tinier that Slacks cows...

U can have a very tiny and functional Arch install... doing this in Slackware is not as "straightforward" as in ArchLinux...

It is recommended to perform a full install of Slackware during install... Pat knows why he advises this...

... never tried to make a minimalist Slackware install, with Arch, its piece of cake...

Indeed. I could install arch core on an old IDE PIO HDD of 800MB (yes, a HDD in MegaBytes ), easily.

Perhaps with Slackware can be done too... if you know the package dependencies until the last bit (not me, lol)

Slackware feels unpolished to me (because it's not),and Ubuntu brings images of drooling noobs asking you how to open the cupholder again to mind. I prefer Fedora. I stuck with 11 the longest time, but now that 13 is out, I have upgraded everything but my server, which doesn't need an upgrade anyway, considering I always turn off updates. Whoops, looks like I'm wandering off topic. I'll shut up :-)

I like slackware a good amount and the main reason is it doesn't mess with the dependency.
I find a amazing amount of dependencies are tagged as recommended or even required even if they are not.

Unpolished how? Please elaborate. Is it only because there is no dep. checking? Or have you come across any packages that are just plain unstable? If so what packages?

no dep checking, no default DE, no patched kernel (which is both good and bad), the installer is an abomination, you get the idea. It's ok for people who want a very "raw" penguin, but I'm happy with fedora.

No, I don't. The default DE is KDE (if you install everything). I think if KDE isn't installed it might go to XFCE, but I never tried to see what the default would be should KDE not be installed. I always just use FluxBox anyways. As for the installer it does what it needs to do. I see nothing wrong with ncurses. FreeBSD also uses ncurses, but I like the Slackware version better, because the text is easier to read.

I haven't ever run into any issues because of no dep. checking. I can't say anything about 'patched' kernels though. Plain vanilla has worked just fine.

edit

If you think ncurses is bad, try OpenBSD. It is just pure text, and we will see if you will be at least a little more appreciative of ncurses,

I'm my Slackware's dependency checker, you can choose from a few DE/WMs during installation which you want as default and switch between them, the installer is OK. It's not raw, it's cooked to perfection.

The installer is ancient technology. I don't leave my system in terminal mode after I install it for the simple reason that you can't fit much information on the screen at one time. It is this limitation of the ncurses installer that prevents easily perusing the packages and picking the things you want from the vast amount of packages (that, true to FOSS nature have names that are a lot of times meaningless as to what the package actually does). This also makes dependency resolution difficult. I installed Linux that way for years before package management systems and GUI installers were developed. Personally, I don't want to spend hours and hours going through packages one by one, reading their descriptions on an 80x24 character screen. I also don't want to install everything. (You actually think that recommending that is a good idea? Yeah, lets make our systems as insecure as possible by ensuring that we get ALL the possible bugs in there.) I don't want to download source files, try to compile, find I'm missing a needed library, download that, attempt to compile again, find out I'm missing something else, lather rinse repeat. I'm very happy with the compile-time choices that were made in the software I install. If at some point I install an application and I'm not happy with those choices, THEN I'll recompile it.

All that being said, when I first installed Linux in 1995, the "Slackware Way"(tm) is how it was done in every distro. So, I learned a lot about how Linux worked and how things were laid out. And it is good to know that there is a place for people to go and learn these same concepts (No, you won't learn them from Ubuntu or Fedora). However, I think that you could learn them equally well if the installer used a resolution higher than 80x24 characters (I wouldn't even care if it didn't use a mouse). 80x24 is fine if you are just answering questions like, "What is your IP address" or "Enter the root password". However, when you are trying to read a 700 character package description it is a PITA. Multiply that by a thousand packages, and I'm looking for an easier way. But then again, I guess so are most of you, and that is why you install everything.

So, here is a question for you Slackers: What would you do if Slackware 13.2 came out and instead of the 80x24 character screen, you were greeted by a similar installer that ran at 1024x768?

I also thought the whole recommendation to install everything it kind of silly. IMO it's obviously a workaround: so that you don't have to bother with manually installing dependencies when you want to install a package, just install everything you might possibly want in the first place!

I have slackware in my current PC (dualboot with OSX86 ATM), and slack is pretty nice. The issue forrestt mentioned can be solved by adding vga=0x315 to the default boot arguments. This allows to installer to use the kernel framebuffer to have a higher resolution.

The reason I've stayed with Slackware is because when I've tried other distros eventually I find one thing that the GUI can't do so I end up going to a command line anyway. Then because I changed one thing outside of the GUI the who GUI config system is not borked. So I found it better to just do it myself from the start.

As far as I can remember, you aren't able to choose your packages in Kubuntu and Fedora Live. That's the "standard" medium they distribute.
In Slackware, you have the choice to install all packages or you can select them individually.

I don't see any difference between the full Fedora / Ubuntu / Kubuntu / clicky-GUI-installer-based-distribution and full Slackware installation.