I ordered an Inspiron 8600 recently from Dell, and currently I am using Red Hat 9 on my desktop. I want to change to a distribution that breast feeds a little less and lets the user do what they want and control their own system.

I have heard good things about Debian and Slack, but I am not sure which one i want to use. I like to develop software, so the distro has to have a good development suite. I hate gnone and kde and prefer minimalistic window managers. I want a reliable distro that will allow me full customization.

Any suggestions?

"of all the things i've lost, i miss my mind the most."
-Hackers (horrible movie, great quote)

This is a very frequently asked question but I shall answer it one last time even though it is the basis for many a flame war.

Basically (and objectively), try both and see what you like.

Subjectively, screw debian. It's shite as far as I'm concerned. I hate the whole package management thing. You want to get your knees into the quagmire that is *nix, get slack. It will leave most stuff up to you to configure to your wants. Sure it has some stuff ready for the n00b but most of this is generic configuration and needs some hardcore tweaking.

One of my first stops (after a kernel re-compile) is the boot scripts in the /etc/rc.d/ directory. I comment out huge chunks of the files here and drastically speed up my start up by doing so.

As far as development goes, this distro should be just as good as any other and will quickly teach you about *nix software development. It is much more closely related to the BSD's so developing for it should allow a lot of easy compiles for other *nixes. Plus it has a good lot of dev libraries installed by default. One of my main gripes before I used slack was having to faff around with rpm's looking for the devel packages. None of this in slack. Most of the time its already there.

If it isn't, you'll learn a lot install them by hand. Remember, /sbin/ldconfig is your friend.

HTH

Alex

All right. That cleared it up for me. Slackware is definitely for me. I have been hearing a lot of good things about Slack, so I guess I will give it a shot. I think that configuring stuff on my own is the best way to learn stuff. I am really thankful for the reply.

no worries....

Glad to have another convert.

Now if only I could everyone to have macs as well then the world would tryly be a happy place. There's nothing quite like the combination of slack and mac...

Alex