Hey fellow slackers, I just wanna know if you were not using slackware then what is the next closest thing you would consider using?

I consider Slackware the only resort in the linux world. Thats why i voted BSD and others which hopefully will emerge in the future.
My last option will be Debian. I think its crippled and i dislike it a lot, and i would like to avoid using it, but it's preferable over MS windows or MacOSx.

Nothing could every replace slackware.

Voted BSD. I discounted Windows from the poll strictly because I need Windows for some stuff. Otherwise I mostly agree with what Sahko said.

My first choice would be some BSD (probably OpenBSD), but also Gentoo if I had powerful desktop machine instead laptop. Although I am not big fan of Archlinux's rolling-release model, I would think about it. In the end, CentOS would also be possibility, but small chances for that.

I curently dual boot with OpenBSD which I like very much. It's just a shame that there's no graphics acceleration to speak of, making it less than ideal for a desktop system. It has a 1GB per process memory limitation due to some of the security mechanisms they use which might be an issue for some. Full disk encryption is missing which is something I enjoy on slackware. I've never managed to get xine/mplayer to play video particularly well on it, and the automatic dependency management built into its 'ports' system is as bad as debian/ubuntu when it comes to it automatically installing things you didn't want. But despite these failings, there's just something about it I like very much.

I tried FreeBSD a few years back, but there was just some intangible thing that OpenBSD had that FreeBSD didn't that meant it didn't appeal to me in quite the same way.

If slackware ceased to be, I'd probably just carry on with the maintenence of my system myself. All the build scripts are there and I already build my own kernels and customise slackbuilds to my tastes. So I'd run GazLware

It's been over 5 years since I've used anything else besides Slackware (and Windows at work). Distro-hopping to find something I like is too much of a waste of time for me to consider at this point. I think I would by a Mac and eventually start playing with the BSDs, if and when I got the itch. I'm typing this on a 2.5 yo Dell E1505 with 1 gig of ram and a dual-core centrino running Windows 7 Enterprise which, if you need to run Windows, isn't entirely awful. I'm surprised it runs as well as it does on this machine, but I've never used Vista so I have nothing to compare it to besides the XP it came with.

I would be biting the bullet and going head first into lfs. I really want to give it a try someday.

OpenBSD.
But, I voted other since I first looked for PCLinuxOS and didn't see BSD's till after I voted.

Arch is great. I love gentoo as well, but just think after hours and days of compile, what if you break something and then what repeat the whole process? :P Anyway, I still have gentoo installed and it works magically.

LFS + BLFS. Possibly one of the BSDs. Maybe Gentoo.

Slackware is my first choice for Linux. Second choice for a distro is FreeBSD as I've used FreeBSD since the 5.x versions.

My #2 is still OpenSuSE, despite the sometimes irritating "politics" of Novell...

Over the years I've tried quite a few distros. I found these interesting, too:

Sabayon
SLAX
Puppy Linux
Xubuntu (only *buntu I liked)
Microsoft Windows 7 (yes, this is the first and only Windows I like, so far, much better than all its predecessors)

I want to try some day:

Arch Linux
T2 (originally a fork of ROCK Linux)

I tried and did not like:

Red Hat
Debian
Ubuntu (the original version)
Kubuntu
Microsoft Windows up to Vista
Mandriva

gargamel

I voted BSD, but it would probably be a mix of *BSD and a very Slackware like lfs.

Haiku.

Or Hannah Montana Linux.