Yes i know about the swaret stuff . Debian, my darling, .

But I can live without it .

My Slackware 10 has now been ruuning for 10 months without a single glitch. That is a record for any OS that I have used, including two Debian-based.
I have started experimenting with Gentoo just to stop me getting stale. BTW, no one has mentioned Gentoo's Portage which gives Apt a run for its money!

I agree that portage is a great tool in gentoo, but after using gentoo for over six months, I gave up. Though everything almost always worked great, I got tired of waiting all the time for things to compile. When I finally came back to debian, I was almost amazed of how quickly one can install huge stuff when having binaries .

I started using Linux with Slackware 9. It was a really great experience. It worked very nice and fast. The only thing which bothered me was it's package management. And after a month I gave Debian a try to see what apt-get is all about. Well, I haven't looked back since..

Though I still think Slackware was easier to set up (apart from the package management).
I have a bit the same with FreeBSD, the system is really great, boots fast, etc etc. But the package management just doesn't feel as good as Debian's.
And the menu system in Debian is great. Though I don't use it anymore since I switched from openbox too Ion3 (now I start everything from the commandline). It's still great for the people who don't use this pc often and just can browse the menu.

grtz

great thread- gave me all the info I needed with out having to post a new thread.

thanks.

titanium_geek

I love both of them. Though right now I'm using debian simply because of its package management. I basicly started out linux using Slackware (since Suse kind of scared me away with some incompatibility problems). And I agree with someone that posted earlier in this thread that these 2 are probably the best of them

salahuddin_66 made some good points.

I have been a Slackware user for quite a while, but as I configure, install,
and maintain more and more programs, it does take alot of time.

I just installed Debian for the first time about 8 hours ago and the thing is
almost completely set up already.

It feels as fast as Slack and the package management is dandy!

I'm going to give it a try for a while.

I love Slack but this Debian is awfully convenient.

IMO, Slackware is the most reliable distro. Debian stable comes close, but it's more complex, and unless they've just released it's likely to be a little stale. However some software (gnucash) practically requires divine intervention to install on Slackware, and though "pure" Slackware is more reliable, swaret has broke it on occasion. Last but not least, Slackware was a PITA to install on my latest & greatest, while Sarge installed as easily on my new box as RedHat did on my older (and more Linux-friendly) box.

I recently wrote a comparison between Debian and Slackware.

Let me know what you people think of this article I wrote:
http://hari.literaryforums.org/?p=14