The pros and cons of Slackware could be summarized in one word: minimalism.

Minimalism means stability. Minimalism means being able to tinker and learn without feeling like one is stuck in a snake pit. Minimalism is wonderful because there is less overhead, which means things tend to break less often. When things do break, resolving the problem usually is more straightforward and quicker. Minimalism means that us folks using older boxes are still finding a lot of life in our hardware.

Minimalism is a potential PITA because you have to configure almost everything by hand. When things break, often there are no fancy tools to help you fix things. In some areas where other distro providers shine, such as automatic hardware recognition, minimalism often means frustration. Even the installation setup can be teeth-grinding at times because the process is linear and there is no way to back trace and fix mistakes or typos before continuing.

In the beginning minimalism means the learning curve is steep and time consuming. I've done my share of spittin' and cussin' learning Slack. However, my boxes are configured the way I want them and not the way some marketing or ivory-towered pinhead thinks they should be configured. Yes, minimalism is a potential PITA, but I have no regrets. I'm no fan-boy of anything, but I waste no time these days thinking about other distros.

The trick? Don't be in a hurry. If you need a box for immediate production then stay with what you have. Keep producing. With each passing day I'm spending more time with Slack, but from the beginning I have maintained my old but trusty NT4 Workstation OS. Thus, there was no pressure to migrate or convert. If you have the time, and can afford another box or even dual boot, then roll up your sleeves and enjoy. In the end that learning curve looks gratifying when reviewed in hindsight. In the end, you don't worry much about the learning curve because minimalism has required you to know the system. In the end, you don't worry much about things breaking because you keep things tuned and know how to fix many common problems. In the past year that I have been tinkering with Slack in earnest I have barely exposed the tip of the proverbial iceberg, but I know that overall I am taking care of my boxes.

You have to decide for yourself. Everybody has different priorities in life and different demands and needs. Slack tends to be popular with the DIY types. But this is a big world and there is plenty of room for 6 billion opinions and 300+ distros. Have fun!

Yea you're damn right. One of the biggest advantages of using slack (or arch) is that you don't depend on stupid gui tools which have more chance to break. It makes yourself much more confident in the system (and that it won't break).
I always see people who use MS windows who go out of their minds, because they just don't know what to do at all when that 1 gui tool fails (if they can even find it trough all the terrible wizards). Even I who knew everything about windows (I tried to make it working well!) came some times to stuff that I couldn't solve because the fucking gui tool didn't work. Then there's nothing you can do. Well I installed slackware directly after realising that windows (I tried every windows) was no good, and the simplicity of editing text files (and that you HAVE to learn it) is the greatest advantage.
You can not use gui tools in other linux distro's too, but in slack (and arch) you're supposed to edit the textfiles and thus you will do it much easier.

That's it, if you want to feel confident with an os, try slack

Slapt-get actually works quite well if you want to install a lot of software from custom repositories like linuxpackages.net and don't want to waste time manually installing dependencies.

Read the manuals though for slapt-get. They give a lot of good advice on updating a system properly.

I also did a full system upgrade once using slapt-get and it worked quite well. It broke a few non-critical apps, but things weren't so bad that it conked out the system. At least some KDE apps were broken, but KDE is such a complex system that even Debian sometimes breaks a few apps here and there during a big upgrade like from 3.3 to 3.4.

So my advice to slapt-get users: Handle With Care! :p

pros:
- its fast (lightning fast actually!)
- easier to maintain than anything else I've tried
- it just works, no messing around with greyed out areas in some fancy gui (mandriva anyone?)

cons:
- me;)