what are the benefits between these two OS's as far as user-friendliness go?

User friendly
Mint -> 10/10

Slackware -> 0/10

Pick Mint if [looks like you already have] user-friendliness is important to you.

Slackware and Mint are about as opposite distros as you can get. Mint aims to be 'user-friendly'. Slackware really doesn't.

lol, at least give slack a 1. Surely it's easier than LFS.

Mint is really friendly.

Slackware is not UN-friendly--it just doesn't try to overdo the friendly thing. But it WILL be your friend if you are really nice to it.....

1 members found this post helpful.

Slackware operates under the assumption that you know what you want to do, and how to do it.

Well Slackware doesn't provide any friendly tools, it's vanilla! Like KDE gives a KPackagekit, which other distros utilize for package management I guess, but Pat didn't integrate it with pkgtool. hence it all depends on upstream developers.

What's not friendly about installpkg, removepkg, slackpkg... ?

Those are all very friendly commands.....
In this context, UN-friendly means no dependency checking by default.

This thread is becoming Slackware vs. the World (not just Mint), and it's a VERY old debate----one which will never be resolved.

lol thats funny that slackware isn't that user-friendly. because in the description of the OS on it's home page is says that one of it's main goals was to be user friendly. fail.

For certain definitions of "user friendly", it is...

They are commands and has no GUI interface. Atleast when you are comparing with a distro like Mint you have to understand the intention of the question. By your definition Arch, gentoo, lfs all are user-friendly. As long as you read and understand and type commands properly, everything is user-friendly. But is that a fair argument? You are misusing the term user-friendly here and I am adamant about taking the extreme approach since we are comparing it with a distro like Mint. had the comparison been between Arch or gentoo I'd say Slack is more user-friendly as most of your job is already done! A complete built system given to you to play with unlike the other two.

I call this, fig. 18.1, a GUI for pkgtools:

http://www.slackbook.org/html/packag...utilities.html

True, it's ncurses and perhaps not as pretty as Synaptic, but it does its job for those who are scared of the CLI.
And there's a similar ncurses GUI for sbopkg, that makes it quick and easy to deal with SlackBuilds.

Even though you are right about the ncurses UI, they are only useful for pre-built slackware packages. Slackware repos are limited and so is slackbuilds.org. Mostly you have to compile your own packages that you won't find there. In case of Mint/Ubuntu/Debian this is not the case. They have vast repositories of packages actively maintained by many people. The term "user-friendly" does not apply here anymore once you have to compile your packages, set configure options, write your slackbuilds. My posts are not trying to undermine the OP's abilities to use Slackware but a general discerning of both these distros in terms of user-friendliness for newbies.
That said, Slackware was my first linux distro. It was a bit difficult but I learnt a huge deal from using slack.

Oh, and this dependency thing. If you're installing a SlackBuild, there's always a README that tells you what else is needed. And with sbopkg, you can write those dependencies in a queue file to be built in the right order. Very friendly.