I'm not sure. I would probably do a little distrohopping to test out some alternatives. Among them I would test Arch, Gentoo, and freeBSD. I have tried Arch and freeBSD, but I didn't feel at home with them. I never feel quite at home when I'm not at a slackware box. If all others failed I would probably end up with kubuntu. I use that on one of my laptops, and I think it's all right.

1º Arch
2º *BSD
3º Solaris....

I voted for another linux but I'm not really sure which one. Definitely something that I've got a chance of understanding.

I learned a lot building LFS (on a slackware host, of course) but I doubt I have the time to go the whole hog and build a production system and keep it up to date.

Another candidate might be tiny core linux which offers another approach to KISS. It comes simple and small (tiny, in fact!) and you can built it up and so in that sense I have hope that I can understand it. But there's quite a bit of effort in that and by the time I've finished building it up I'd probably have a rather large distro with a tiny core at its heart.

I do use Ubuntu a little and if I did want to go that route for my everyday laptop (which I don't really) then I'd probably go for Mint. A colleague of mine uses it at work and gets on very well with it.

I'm now intrigued by so many Slackers opting for Arch as their second distro in this poll. Will give that a look.

In the very unlikely event that Slackware suddenly disappeared, I would also have to choose FreeBSD as my primary new Unix-like OS.

Oh gosh, haven't seen Arch as an option until I voted FreeBSD...
It's just that the BSD-style boot system is so good... I'll never know why those Ubuntu guys decided to complicate even more sysvinit to come up with that upstart or something...

This was my 'padawan path':

Ubuntu -> Debian -> Arch -> Slackware.

I liked Debian and Arch a lot but while the former was slow on updates, the latter was way too fast... my GNOME broke even before I knew it!

I have built LFS, CLFS and further onto BLFS many times. Also DIY Linux (which is related and I prefer). However, given the number of LFS replies, I think some folk just don't realize just how much work is involved building an entire system with X, many DE's and a packaging system. Thank God that the team puts all this effort in behind the scenes to produce a superb, easily maintainable (for the user), and easily controllable system like Slackware. No other distro comes close and I appreciate the work involved in producing an entire distribution like Slackware. If most folks would be forced into doing all of this themselves, not even mentioning component security and other package updates, I think a ready made distro would win out.

+1 on the effort involved in LFS. Just LFS 6.3 took me 6-8 hours of keyboard/build time using "make -j9" on an i7 920... andthat's without X. I can guarantee that if it were my primary OS, I wouldn't log in as root without a gun to my head prior to getting a verified backup! It's a good experience though.

The time to a working system is one of my favorite parts about Slackware. The simplicity of the instalation allowed me to get up and going on a low end midrange laptop in about 20 minutes (skipped emacs, and kde) recently. Pat's installer is just awesome if you ask me.

Debian.

I'm running Ubuntu on my laptop and netbook because they came with it factory installed and if it ain't broke . . . But I much prefer Debian to Ubunto.

One of the things I really like about Slackware is that I can login as root, do root stuff, then log out. I find distributions that disable the root login by default annoying. I can live with them, but I still find them annoying.

Of the distros I've tried, Slackware gives me the most control. Debian was second. And it is my computer, darn it.

For me it was: Ubuntu > Debian > Zenwalk > Slackware! Since Zenwalk is based on Slackware it led me try Slackware.
This is true. If you are going to run Arch, you have to stay on top of their changelogs and subscribe to their mailing lists. Things will break in Arch from time to time. Usually there will be a reported fix posted in their mailing list or on the Arch site though.
That is one of the great things about Slackware. You know the updates will just work.

Hi,

I would run on a rooftop, towards the edge....

And mind you, I run Slackware as second choice!

As if the Arch fanboism wasnt enough, now theres Slackware fanboys in here too

Yes. These are some of the reasons why I formatted my one Arch box and moved back to Slackware-current. By comparison Slackware-current is very conservative in the way it applies security patches and adds new software. Arch is a nice system, but, it is *too* bleeding edge for my tastes. My Slackware LAN consists of four 13.1 boxen and two -current boxen.

On my boxes with slackware I'd probably throw on Chakra or Arch.

Out of depression I'd probably wipe my hard disks and just use puppy and wolvix on my multi-iso boot flash drive.

Since Another Debian variant is one of the choices in this poll, I just thought of Sidux. Although I have never actually tried it, (I have been meaning to though ... one of these days!!!) I have read many good things about Sidux and very few, if any bad things about it. Sidux is a Debian based distro that tracks Debian's unstable (Sid) branch. Sidux is said to make Debian unstable usable and stable enough for the mere mortal Debian user.
Sidux would likely be on my short list in this hypothetical post Slackware universe.