I want to dive head first into linux and learn pretty much everything. I have spent some time with Fedora, Arch, and Ubuntu, I want to move on to a distro that will force me to think outside the package manager (if necessary) and be flexible enough to do a lot of things I want to be able to do.

The distro needs to be very stable and efficient. I want to be able to install software on their to create clock speed profiles, like speedstep or cool&quite, but user customized. Also, full sleep mode is another thing, fans shut off and everything. This should be available in every distro...these things are important.

I want something that is very modular, customizable, and something that I can keep tweaking and playing with tell I reach some sort of "perfection". Plays nice with multiple monitors and KVM switches is good too. Not sure which GUI shell would be best for that. I am somewhat partial to gnome but I like KDE well enough too.

My hardware for all of this:

AMD Opteron 165 (939 dual core)
2x512mbDDR
8800gt

I was thinking I would probably go with either Arch, OpenSuse, or Gentoo. Leaning a bit towards Gentoo. Any input would be nice, going to install one tomorrow .

Hi,

In my humble opinion, Slackware! I started out with Slackware 13 only a couple of months ago after playing around with Debian, Ubuntu, and others. And boy, did I have to change my way of thinking. I can really advice to go with Slackware. Now I have it running on all my personal PC's and laptops.

Kind regards,

Eric

In a way, gentoo is quite the most tweakable distro. Also, efficiency and speed is claimed a lot (as everything is compiled for your system specifically).

Fans shutting off in sleep mode is more a feature of the hardware (specifically the power supply and the motherboard, each responsible for its own fans) than the software. For me, at least, there was no operating system that would shut off the fans of my old Acer power supply, and all of them can shut off my current Coolink. Most probably, it is a feature of the power supply to shut fans off automatically if the power drain is very low.

I think KVM switches don't really trouble any software, as they are designed to be transparent to the host computer.

I've mentioned Gentoo before which seems to fit some of your criteria.
One other choice is Debian Sid (unstable). Despite the name, it is no less stable than any other bleeding-edge distro, and certainly no less stable than a system that has many manually-compiled components (for which you will forget the dependencies in time). However, it does require some meddling, and sometimes you need to fix the bugs/incompatibilities yourself. One good point in that is that you can post the fixed dependency structure/build scripts/etc. back to the community.

There is only one that matches that criteria:

Slackware

I have heard some bad things about slackware, mostly that is is incredibly old and using it you can very easily destroy your machine (not hardware, but yeah). I guess other then the fact that slackware doesn't have a package manager, what are the advantages with it over something like gentoo?

Is the support base for slackware very good? Will there be a lot of people to go to for help when I get stuck?

Slackware is not old. If you mean by age , then yes it is the oldest maintained [beating Debian by a month?] linux distro. Whoever gave you such a false, misleading info? Destroying hardware by using slackware? One of the best Linux distro, which specializes in stability above all, then I wonder what can be considered useable by you. :P
But seriously whoever told you that , ask for proof and citations.

Slackware does have a package manager, it's called pkgtool, it doesn't have dependency resolution. It's not a bug, it's a feature.

Support base is here at this forum, it is quite good. Slackers are one of the most intelligent class of Linux users around and very helpful. You are always welcome to ask your questions in the Slackware section of this forum , which is considered the "official" slackware forum.

This hurts, even to a newbie Slacker like me And it's all so not true. Probably people who couldn't get it to run or were just to plane lazy to give it a whirl say stuff like that.

I can tell you for a fact that I only started with Slackware a couple of months ago, got most of the stuff running after the install and got PREMIUM support right here at LinuxQuestions.

Before believing 'hear say' from others, why don't you give it a try and see for yourself. Then you can form your own opinion.

Kind regards,

Eric

In a way the statement about destroying the machine (assuming you mean break the OS) is correct. In order to have the maximum of control over any system, one must have the ability to break the system. If you want the maximum ability to customize your machine then you have to have this ability. One just comes with the other. That is not a slam on slack, it applies to any OS.

The other thing to realize is that you can do this with virtually any distro out there. I use RH based distros (RHEL, Centos, Fedora, etc), with them there is just the extra step of building the rpm and installing it (assuming you do not want to break the package manager) rather than just compiling and installing. While the details of the process are different for deb based distros, the concept is the same.

Slackware is the most stable OS I have ever used, bar none.

Its smooth and easy to use, IF you take the time to learn about it and how to do things

Actually, running Slackware taught me more about Linux/Ubuntu/Debian than any other distro
ever has.

Think of Slackware as a Base to build on to.
Its really customizable and has so much support here at LQ

Then you got sbopkg, src2pkg, Slackyeu, etc that just makes Slack even better

That's correct.
Slack is about a month 'older' than Debian.

I am honestly surprised you didn't find what you were looking for with Arch. Slackware and Gentoo would both be nice. Although I don't have experience with Gentoo. Just heard things. I also prefer dependency resolution, but I am lazy. I've got to wonder if you had somebody else install Arch for you.

Ok, I think I am going to go with slackware. I want to learn a lot about linux and I have heard a lot of people say this distro made them do that. Thanks for the input guys