I want to know the plus and negatives for Red Hat vs Slackware. I used Red Hat before but in GUI. Know I want to use linux only in prompt mode. No graphics for me mainly. I may want to use gui from time to time. I would be using the distrobution to learn about installing security running it etc. I would just be using it to learn all about linux. I will be doing programming on it c, c+, perl etc. What would you suggest.

Slackware: light, fast, stable
RedHat: none of the above

More info would be great.

well you say you only want to use the distro in text mode, so does it really matter what distro you do use?
there is only going to be very minor differences (some none) with some distros when comparing them text based ...
but outta the two i will sugget slack, just to answer you ..

What the difference if I don't only use text mode?

Well, if you want CLI, a default Slack install defaults to runlevel 3 and a command line. RH doesn't. Sure, it's easy to switch either one around but I still think that says something. I have never used RH and never will, so I can't really say, but screwy directories, patched binaries, specialized RH-specific tools, an emphasis on big business and graphics - none of these things would be useful to you. A lot of pointless overhead to strip away and work around. Slack is much more basic and generic. While it has pkgtool and allied tools, compiling is basically expected. I do it from a user-standpoint but the same things would apply for a programmer trying to develop and compile his own applications, I'd expect. Also, I suspect Slackware is a lot easier to customize to your needs and is designed to be customized with a text editor from the command line - or at least from a text editor. I gather RH expects configuration to be done from a 'control panel' in a GUI. And there's probably quite a lot of layers of configs and non-standard gotchas to deal with. Slack's 'just the files' and has few surprises.

Besides, it's just a great distro for any purpose. It seems most developers use Debian, Slack, Gentoo, etc. For CLI, learning Linux, programming... yeah, I wouldn't see RH for that. Slack's the ticket.

That being said, you can do anything with any Linux. Just that with Slack there are probably the least impediments to doing what you want.

-- Musta forgot to hit refresh. I missed the last posts. Slack is not at all deficient when it comes to the GUI. It runs all the wm's and IDE's like anybody else. Handling .xinitrc with xwmconfig or substituting your own like I sorta did is easy. Reconfiguring to runlevel 4 (runlevel 5 on RH) is no trouble, though I don't see why people do that. Like I say, any distro *can* do most anything.

Red Hat - Point and click.
Slackware - Take over the world inside your computer (and possibly beyond).

Red Hat - Stay here and use the many functions and advances of Linux.
-- or --
Slackware - See just how far the rabbit hole goes.

cheesy post isn't it >;]

Moving to Linux - Distributions where distro question go

Cool