Agreed. The installer in Ubuntu is a bit locked-in. That is why I prefer Debian to Ubuntu. Debian has an excellent text based installer that does allow you to make modifications to a standard installation.
Slackware will always be my preferred distro; we have total control over our systems. Slackware rules.

George

Yeah, I feel like I"m in total control; I feel responsible for how well my computer functions, however that takes credit away from Pat and the team. I think more important than total control is just the non-assumption that the developers know what I want, so they make a system that responds to customization and needs it, just like Emacs.

As I've pointed out before, there are no wallpapers included with KDE that say "Slackware...", you have to go get them. I think you all know what I mean.

Joel

How long does it take to get comfortable with Slackware?
installing and configuring programs?

I think that really depends on your experience in Linux. If you're comfortable navigating on the command line and are okay with editing text files you'll do fine with Slackware. But, even if you don't have a lot of experience with Linux Slackware is an excellent educational experience. I would recommend that you read a lot of the on-line literature that is freely available about Slack.
This forum is my favorite port of call when I need help:-)

I would recommend making notes when you puzzle out how to do something. I have a link to my installation notes on my desktop and find them very useful, especially if I do a fresh installation.

Here's what I did, and maybe you can follow the same model:

I had PCLinuxOS 0.93 installed for a few months. I learned about Linux, I read parts of the Slackbook, I read read read and then read some more. The most helpful were the Slackbook and Running Linux. Then I installed Slackware on a spare partition with the /home and / on the same partition. Then I messed with it for a while until I got it up and running. I was not depending on it. After a while I installed it at work, then an even more while after that I was so used to Slackware (less than 10% of my computing is done at home) that I installed it as my main distro at home. Bye bye PCLinuxOS and bye bye init.d.

Try that, i.e., install something "easy" like Ubuntu or PCLinuxOS (I would definitely recommend the latter), and install Slackware on an extra 6GB. Mess with it. It's fun.

To answer your question: if you don't do your homework, you will be frustrated and you will give up within a few days. Do your homework and you will feel comfortable right away, but you'll still be learning things years later.

Joel

How involved it is to install and configure openoffice and k3b?

Before I switched to Slackware, I used Suse. By the time I made the switch to Slackware, I was familiar enough to navigate around and that's about it. Learning Slackware at first was daunting at times but after using it everyday, it became intuitive. I now use my Slackbox for most of my daily tasks.

There's a saying:

"When you learn Red Hat, you learn Red Hat; when you learn Slackware, you learn Linux."

The Slackbook, which has been mentioned, is a tremendously helpful resource in addition to this forum.

Some links you might find helpful:

http://www.linuxcommand.org/

http://packages.slackware.it/

http://www.linuxpackages.net/

I did them both off the Slackware 11 DVD, and it was very easy.

K3b did almost all the work itself - it found all three drives (SCSI and IDE DVDROMs and SCSI CDRW) and identified them correctly.

OpenOffice asked all the usual config questions, but there were no problems.

What has been more of a pain with Slackware is setting up vncserver (it wanted a very long list of other stuff, not presently installed), DVD play (ditto), and Midi.