Here is my Linux journey...
Mandrake 8.0 - I liked it at first, but I grew to dislike the whole RPM process.
Redhat 8.1 (I think..) - Again, I got sick of RPMs
Gentoo 1.3 - emerge was cool, but taking an entire weekend to install it was tiresome.
Slackware 8.1+ - Installed it and loved it! Has everything I want in a distro.

I still hop between Win2k and Slack 9.1 because of games, but I spend most of my time in Linux.

SWARET and slapt-get don't fulfill your needs?

Not to get off topic but just a quick question - I have swaret on my box because I thought I might use it but never have and don't know anything about slapt-get but, looking over some docs, those are exclusively for *.tgz Slackware packages - essentially pre-compiled binaries - and require you establishing a set of searches before hand, right?

I just search the whole net, grab source tarballs, often make modifications (though usually trivial and none-too-successful with mozilla), and then compile them. I've added several slackpacks when the mood struck me, but usually compile from sources. There are problems with all this centralized automated stuff to me. So, two things: with swaret and the like I couldn't have found the mozilla source code or it would have been pointless to do so, right? And when I got a very strange build out of that, with swaret and the like I never could have found the xft-enabled mozilla 1.6alpha in a directory I didn't even know existed until I stumbled across it on a search engine?

(If anything pulls me away from Slack, I suspect it will be LFS.)

Actually my main distribution is Gentoo for one and a half year now (it was Debian before that), today I've installed Slackware to try it out again (played with an older version once, can't exactly remember which). I just found out about those tools and thought lhawkwing might want to know about them.

Oh, no doubt - a lot of people seem not to know about those tools and those who do seem to love them. I was just curious about whether my understanding of their purpose was correct. I need something to make source tarballs magically appear and unpack into my source directory so I can just start compiling and I just figured that's not what those are for. *g*

If you're that much into the compiling from source business then maybe you should check a source-based distribution?

Yeah - that's why I say if anything, it'd be something like LFS. Still reading about it although I got extremely distracted. I just like saying to the apps '*You* go *here* with *these* options'. I sometimes have a control-freak streak. And I love checkinstall because the automated packaging, integrated list in /var/log/packages, and easy removal if I don't like it, is great. It's getting it and putting it *on* the system that I like to be able to configure in detail, manually. And I figure for their purposes, swaret and whatnot would be just as much of a blast. So I didn't want to miss anything. But I do have an i686 that still needs a Linux or two. This one's Slack and Debian so that one should probably be LFS and Gentoo.

Anyway - sorry about that - on with the thread.

I've been a happy Slack user for three months now and think I've learned a lot on Linux in general. Most of my knowledge comes from the eternal struggle between Slackware itself and my poor laptop.

I used to be a c64/amiga/dos/winblows9x user in this order and I'm very proud to be part of the linux community. I, as many others, made the transition from winsucks to linux starting with a horrible redhat7 experience and then made the great step buying a mandrake9.0 7 cd distro which was successfully installed and run almost flawlessly, excepted a few troubles with laptop battery apm/acpi... When I started using Mandrake I didn't have any idea where to start to really learn something. Moreover I really hadn't the need to understand and use linux. I then started working as a doctoral student and felt the need to learn. So I tried Debian... Things started to get interesting... But I didn't even succeed in starting X...
Finally I got Slack... where my training field started.... and has never ended... and never will, of course.

my story is a bit out of the ordinary... not because i had problems or anything but... let's just say choosing slackware was a chalenge in a way...
i'm from romania and the linux community around here isn't what you'd expect it to be...
9 out of 10 guys who use linux actually use linux on rooted boxes in or outside the country... this i find totally stupid... because they should be constructive.. not the opposite...
my first contact with linux was the same.. and i am not proud of that... then i quit that and installd rh 7 at home.. then went on to 7.2 and 7.3, which did a very poor job for me and when win xp came on the market i switched to it without a hitch...
about 6 months ago i took over administering my university's servers.. actually 2 gateways which i'm very proud of
this is now why i'm using slack... because.. even if those are suse and gentoo... the other admin laughed at me when i told him i wanna put slackware on my workstation... he said why bother... it's hard to set up anyway...
i said.. ok.. i'll show it to u already running
and i downloaded the 4 slackware 10.1 isos, installed it.... got over the x problem(x server would'n start because of a faulty config..) and now i even play cs on it with cedega...
i just love it... i would't give it up for anything...
try it !

Lot of Slackware addicts here eh?

*Nyananananah* to all of you! I uthe Debian. Tho there

Tried Slackware, didn't like it for several reasons so went back to Debian. I guess that gap between Debianites and Slackers is too deep to bridge

I use both . I love both. They both make you learn.

I went from redhat 9 to slackware 10 on my server, weren't too impressed with the fedora core releases which was my main reason for searching for a new distro. Anyway I liked slackware so much I decided it would do for my desktop, so I have slackware 10.1 on that.

Even in my 8-bit Commodore/Amiga/MS-DOS days I was always curious about UNIX. I had heard about the GNU project and then I started hearing something about a free version of UNIX called Linux. In 1994 I picked up a big Que book "Using Linux" which included a CD with an early version of Slackware (I don't remember the version number but the kernel was in the 1.2.xx range.) I installed it to a spare partition and got it going at the command line, but had no luck with X. I was pretty deep into OS/2 at the time so I put Linux aside for a while.

By the end of 1996 I was getting irked with the direction of OS/2 and UNIX seemed a better fit for the things I wanted to do. At this time RedHat was making a name for themselves as the "friendly" Linux, so I picked up RedHat 4.0 and spent my Christmas 1996 holiday converting my OS/2 home network server to RedHat. Worked pretty well, though I did have to backtrack to OS/2 on my server for a few months. I gradually put more of my attention into Linux and when I got a job as an assistant Solaris administrator in 1997 I went Linux full time.

I stayed with RedHat through 4.x, 5.x, 6.x and the first days of 7.x but found that I was spending too much time trying to wrestle RedHat into working the way I wanted to work. For professional reasons I dropped Linux in favor of Windows 2000, and even did a bit of DOS on my own (!) until 2003. When I was getting back into UNIX at work, I tried RedHat 8 at home and found it every bit as annoying as I last remembered it, so I decided to give Slackware another go now that I had more experience. I put up Slackware 9.0 and I've been with Slack ever since.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not yet another "e1eet h@x0r" sneering at RedHat. I'll always be grateful to them for getting me into Linux and letting me get some experience. It's just that Slackware is inherently much closer to the kind of system that I would build were I to build or maintain my own distribution. It stays small and fast, provides all the basics, sticks to UNIX standards without being fossilized by them, and best of all supports modern GUI monstrosities without actually requiring them every step of the way.

Reading here, I never realized just what a hard-core old-timer I am.

I picked up Slack back in '93, when it first came out. Downloaded the floppy images via the university network and installed them on my 386SX-16. I managed to get X working, and absolutely loved what I had going. Even with a pre 1.0 kernel, it was a perfect environment for C programming, which I was learning at the time, as well. Sometime, around the time that Win95 was available as a Beta, I downloaded DOSEMU and got it running (quite a feat at the time, I was proud of myself) and used Linux with DOSEMU to do my primary employment, supporting a DOS based database system.

Prior to Slack, I'd used MCC, but really loved Slack much more. In the interim, I've bounced from distro to distro, usually based on the needs of my work, where we used RedHat at IBM, and an occasional Mandrake install, and again when I was freelancing and needed to set up a web-based email solution and they had a set of RH9 CDs.

But on my personal machine, I've tried a dozen distros, and keep coming back to Slack.

I've got PC at the end of 2003. I was on the 1st Univesity course.
Of course, the first OS was Windows.
The first very awful experience was with Mandrake9.2. I really disliked Linux that time. It was about 2004's spring.
At the end of the 2004 I've got Slackware10.0.
At the end of March I completely removed Windows.
And during this half a year I like Slackware very much.
And, of course, I like very helpful guys here.
Linux has changed my point of view on the world. I've discovered Open Source for myself. And now I really believe - Open Source is the future for EVERYTHING in our life.