Started with Ubuntu, used it for less than a week when my brother told me to install Slack if I wanted to learn Linux, so I did it, it was Slackware 12.0. I've tried Gentoo twice and didn't like it, also did LFS once.

Slackware is my favorite distro and it'll always be :-)

I played with Slackware around '95-'96, but got my first actual use out of Linux with SuSe 6. I became a full time Linuxer with Mandrake 7 and was a happy Mandrake/Mandriva user/promoter/fanboy until early this year. Mandrake was a Red Hat descendant so that will have to qualify my use as I never actually used any Red Hat version.

I loved Mandriva for ease of initial install, good package depth with mostly clean reliable RPMs and a mostly clean Linux foundation where I could do my system admin from a terminal - never much used the Mandriva GUI tools.

With 2008 and then 2009 releases, I had to find another distro. Two main problems:
1. Mandriva GUI tools began to claim 'ownership' of my basic system configs and more or less crippled my ability to safely manage it all my way.
2. KDE4, almost too much downside to mention - and I was heavy, happy KDE3 user.

I looked at a couple of options but after my first fresh install of Slackware 12.1 earlier this year I looked no further. Have changed most of my systems, personal and business, to Slackware already and will migrate the rest as the need/opportunity arises.

Pros: Solid basic system, easy initial install and no GUI entanglements with my system admin tasks. As an added bonus I had not appreciated before hand - no Gnome entanglements/dependencies either! And one of the best advantages of all, a knowledgable user base such as you will find on this forum! I never participated in a Linux forum before switching to Slackware and mostly always felt I had to really filter out the useful posts from the background noise when searching for information. The signal to noise ratio is much better overall with Slack users - my compliments to all!

Cons: ...? ...? I honestly can't think of any from my experisnce so far...

I started off with Slackware in the 90's. Other distributions confuse me now. A friend has a Ubuntu installed on his computer. I thought I'd drop to runlevel 3 to manually install NVIDIA's drivers as Ubuntu's NVIDIA packages wouldn't work for him. However on Noobuntu runlevel 3 uses a graphical manager... as Slackware has always taught me, runlevel 3 is cli only! So a few minutes later after figuring out how Ubuntu is set up runlevel 3 was back to cli goodness and the drivers were installed! Thanks Slackware for teaching us how things are really to be done.