Yeah, Rock Linux belongs there as well. It is still around, and recently one of developers previously involved in Rock forked it into his own distro called T2. I've been meaning to try it out too, but I'm running out of computers, partitions, and time

Well, all this talking about Rock and I just *HAD* to go back and try it out. T2 apparently still uses the Rock source tree and just does things a little different ( at least that's the impression I got). Still, it's just like I remember (been about a year and a half or so)... but it does have some new stuff in it ( package management scripting is a little different than it used to be).

I categorize it not by difficulty but by tediousness (note the difference).

Slackware sure is tedious to set up because you have to hand edit files (this may be easy to those who know, still tedious enough).

Debian is probably the middle of the road -- neither wholly newbie, nor totally a "geeky" distro.

SuSE, RedHat, Fedora -- never tried SuSE, but Fedora and RedHat tend to feel a lot more unstable and too many cluttered GUI configuration tools.

The best option to system administration apart from either hand-editing files or configuring them using GUI tools is webmin.

Webmin can really be handy and it has a nice, consistent interface where you can configure so many aspects of your Linux system without actually hand-editing files.

For me easiest was Arch and Slackware. And Mandrake along with Knoppix was the hardest. And with LFS, it is as hard as YOU make it .
So I guess if you know some CLI, and got some experience nothing is hard to use. It only can be furstrating.

I just finished setting up a Gentoo (stage 1) system and didn't run into that problem so I they must have.
I have one thing to say though: Emerging KDE = Dios Mio!!! (36hrs).

Heh, that's nothing. For my first installation of MyGeOs I used a spare PII/400 with 128mb RAM. This box had a task of building the complete set of apps included on MyGeOs CD - core system, Xorg, KDE, mozilla, gimp, fluxbox and xfce4... it took somewhere around 92 hours - just short of 4 days! ... oh well, so what? That's what spare computers are for

And apart from taking so long, it worked like a champ! Everything built without a single error... I never had Gentoo builds go this smooth, in my couple of attempts at using Gentoo.

If your ultimate goal is to become an elitist OS snob, how about NetBSD?

He was asking about linux, but of all *BSD's I recommend OpenBSD - was much harder for me. They do not even provide ISO's (as far as I know). Also Solaris is pretty cool.

I'm not sure why you'd want to make Linux installation hard, but I suppose the hardest, most badass l33t approach to installing Linux is: don't use a distribution. Don't use Linux from Scratch. Decide what you want in your Linux installation, and then build it from the ground up. (I can't tell you how to do this, because that might make it easier )

If you really want punishment, write all your own software (C compiler, linker, shell interpreter, etc.) instead of using GNU and other free tools. Fun!

*LMAO at this thread*
I think Knoppix or Xandros are the most "hardcore" or "badass" out there.

I'll toss Sorcerer into the mix,for me its like learning a new language.

LFS-(BOOK+GNU) seems a little too much considering it is not 1995. I would think LFS would be the ultimate Linux to do. LFS is more about learning linux beyond what Slackware or Gentoo can give you. I don't really see any point in trying to use some thing that is hard just because it is hard. If you want hard, try doing LFS on a Old World Mac. I am trying to do that myself and it is hard to even start the install.

Why not code your own Linux distro with assembly. Can't get much more badass hardcore than that. Or maybe run Windows ME...

Agreeing with the folks that said Linux from Scratch.
Whining and "badass" do not mix. Sorry.