My advice: Try them both and see which suits you best.

Everyone's tastes are different and sometimes even the subtlest of aspects may put you off a distro. For me it was that Arch don't have a crypto-signing mechanism for their packages.

I have used both and I like both very well. I do like pacman and have chosen to stick with Arch over the last several months anyway, but I still boot up Slackware every once in a while. If you do not have an internet connection, I'd go with Slackware. It's a great OS and it's very stable. You can always download packages from slackbuilds.org and save them to USB to install on your machine later. Just my 2 cents :)

Thanks Gazl,

I knew some one would say so, but both these distros require huge amount of time to set up. That's why i preferred to know which one should i prefer to start with.

And i do want to start LFS soon, will my choice of arch or slack effect it ?

Thanks, but i was attracted towards Arch as it doesn't have even a GUI installed by default, it would have proved to be a great learning curve !

Everything's included. All you have to do is run, as root:
That applies to any Slackware package, installpkg filename. Easy, huh?

Slackware boots by default into runlevel 3, no X, no GUI.

Thanks brian, that was a relief !

Can't do such things in Arch ?

Ok it means learning Linux will be same irrespective of whether i install arch or slack ??

I've never tried Arch (yet), but it is a rolling release, which means more dependent on a constant internet connection. Try dual-booting both of them, eh?

Offtopic:

I am not a native english speaker:
Do words like "huh" and "eh" denote scarsism ?

I've never actually timed it, but installing Slack doesn't take long.

No, not sarcasm.
Huh? and Eh? = Don't you think so? (more or less). Or:
Eh? = I can't believe you just said that.
Depends on context.

:)

Actually, Slack doesn't take as much effort as you might think.

Slackware is relatively quick to install and setup. Arch does take time to get your DE running etc. The actual install to your CLI doesn't take very long at all though

It does if you're not planning on performing full installs and would like just the "base system" (AAA or somesuch? haven't used Slackware in a while) + programs you directly use and their dependencies.