I apologize in advance for the flame wars which will probably take place. I've used plenty of different linux distrobutions. I've spent most of my time with mandrake, from the early 8's to the 10's. I've also used a lot of red hat from the 9's to the fc4. SuSE and others fall in there somewhere too. But the point is this; On 90% of the installations I usually end up wiping out the drives and completely reinstalling everything. This usually happens because of the packaging system screwing up. I'm sure we've all had it happen. You install some rpm or w/e from the distro's acclaimed simple and near flawless packaging system and the whole thing is dead. Either it be no more one click upgrades or dependencies suddenly not being dependent.

Long story short: Is there a distro with a stable packaging system where if I add and remove packages all day the whole system won't be rendered useless?

Debian is perfect for that. Synaptic, apt-get/dpkg and aptutide mean you can add or remove anything or everything without breaking your system, and keep configuration files if you want. It aslo resolves dependancies and conflicts automatically. I have been adding and removing many packages constantly (some seem to be more useful, then I change my mind) and it has always worked. The initial setup can be harder than rpm distributions, but it is also extremely stable later on.

When you are ready, enter the matrix. Install SLACKWARE. People who use it claim that it has magical abilities. Once you try it you'll never leave it. Even when in anger you wipe your drive you'll inevitably go back to Slackware

Thanks for the reply. I can usually talk most a linux distro into installing after enough effort. Continual stability would be much appreciated.

I've attempted a few slackware installs from a couple different versions, but they always end in failure. How well is the package management of slackware?

SLack uses source tarballs and installing is simple by using one command "installpkg" or "uninstallpkg'
It also has Debian's apt-get but called "Slapt-get". Also large repository of packages especially prepackaged for Slackware in on site http://www.linuxpackages.net

slackware does not do any dependancy checking or anything... it's definitely NOT what you're looking for... ( i love it, don't get me wrong) but as stated previously... Debian is very stab;e with it's package management... also...

arch linux has a great package manager... it's not a distro particularly geared towards newer users... but if you're confortable with doing all the configuration from the command line.. it's very nice..