I want a linux distro that will help me learn the ins and outs of linux, without the tedious entering of commands? Gentoo seems like it offers that, but with a long tedious install. Sabayon solves this, but I hear it's buggy. Would Slackware help me learn without a boring install? I've installed Slackware and it's easy.

I'm not quite sure what you are looking for. Learn the ins and outs? The command line is the command line. Interested in installing your applications from source code? You actually can do that with any of the distros. If you are interested in learning how to edit configuration files and scripts, then I guess slackware would be a good choice. But you can do that with any distro, you just aren't forced to in some of them. If you have installed and configured slackware to your satisfaction, why change?

Perhaps you could look at linux from scratch and see if that is what interests you.

I'm not quite sure myself what I want. I just really hate the idea of a long, boring install to get into the distro. I just want something that after the install forces me to learn the OS so I won't be mindlessly copy and pasting commands.

If you want to be "forced" to research how to get the OS doing what you want, then I think slackware or linux from scratch would be good.

http://www.slackware.com/book/
http://tldp.org/guides.html
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/live...mentation.html
http://hplip.sourceforge.net/install...stros/lfs.html

Also consider the BSDs.

Alright thanks man, and to answer your previous question I only ran slackware in vmware and I'm thinking of switching to a harder distro for my desktop so that's why I'm asking.

The thing is, if you're picking a distro that's more technically oriented (like Slackware), and you want to learn the ins and outs of it, then the install is probably going to be text-based and boring. But, that's the price you pay to be a guru. If you want to be a GNU/Linux guru, then Slackware is the way to go by far. Distros like Ubuntu are great, but you will never learn the ins and outs with it - ever.

Check this thread out. It's essentially the same as yours except with a lot more input :

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ion...-642048/

And, if that happens to not be what you want - then you'll probably (99% chance) want to use Zenwalk Linux. It's Slackware-Lite pretty much.