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Hey, I'm currently using Mandrake right now, and I've seen lots of posts where people say SlackWare is better for learning how Linux works.

How is it better for teaching? The only thing I can think of, is Mandrake has a lot of GUI for changing settings, adding users etc .. I could see on SlackWare you'd have to add them through the console?

I did try to add SlackWare along with Mandrake, but I guess I messed up when using fdisk, cause Mandrake/Slackware wouldn't boot after.

Thanks

With slackware you have a much more standard (albeit still customized) distro without so many 'Mandrake' or 'Redhat' tools. Thus it can be slightly more daunting to configure (not that you really have to configure that much) but you'll learn much more about the exact text config files that control your system.

Hi.

This is my personal opinion:

Mandrake suffers from the same problem than Windows. Lots of nice GUI tools BUT, when these don't work, you are left with a lot of problems because you don't really know what these do. I also found the GUI tools are sometimes really buggy and do not work "as advertised". :(

Slackware is much "harder" than Mandrake because it does not have GUI tools, but, on the other hand, you HAVE TO learn the system and really know which file does what.

Once you grok how Slackware is organized, you actually use it and configure it much faster and with a lot more confidence, because there are no "bad surprises". The entire operating system works and is much more stable.

So, it's a question of "picking your poison": ease-of-use vs stability. Overall, I find the "Slackware way" to be better, but I totally understand why some people like Mandrake better.

Hope this helps... :D