Ok now I have experience with Slackware from 7x and am having a deliema.

I am wondering if I should change distros. I keep on looking at Open BSD, SuSE and Gentoo.

I will be eventually setting up a home network of just a few pc's perhaps 4 or 5 including firewall and IDS boxes. In addition to that I will be slowly starting to learn to code.

I also want to be able to play a few decent games. First person, strategy or what have you.

I found out that some of the other distros *BSD and linux look for dependancies and Slack doesn't. I was wondering if this is a huge problem as well.

I tried RH and MDK as well but they didn't feel good so I went to Slack and haven't turned back.

Attn Mod's who like to constantly refer people to search the forums: I have been searching the forums and lurking for a couple of weeks. I would like to get some opinions of people who have actually used these distro's or have needs similar to my own. I have combed all of the respective websites and choose not to rely on propoganda. Btw I tried to change the message subject but it isn't happening for me. Thank you.

Thank you for reading this. Thank you for flaming me. Thank you for moving this post. Thats it good bye.

I swapped to suse 8.1 from Mandrake 9 and I think suse is better easy everything. Auto updates.

Gonus

Let me qualify this by saying I am a slack user and therefore am biased. Now, let me ask you a few questions:

Have you ever had a problem in Slackware thus far with dependencies? If not why are you worrying about it now? If you have had problems how did you solve them?

In my eyes ldd is fine for determining dependencies in Slack, though with some of the bigger programs it is time consuming to trackdown the missing dependencies. I had much greater difficulties with the various RPM distros than Slack. I consider dependency checking a convenience more than a requirement.

That said if dependency checking is a concern for you then Gentoo or Debian might be better choices. It will always be a matter of give and take. Of the two I would recommend Gentoo even though it was not to my taste and I never could get comfortable with it.

I used SuSE before Slack, and i have to say SuSE is not what everyone thinks, at least not for me. YAST can be great for newbies, but it keeps on screwing any custom file editing you might do. I dont like SuSE much..
If you want to try something else, try Debian or gentoo. I never used them, but heard great things, especially about Debian.
But we all know you'll go back to Slack
-NSKL

**Plug** If you want something easy to update and run on 4-5 boxes use debian **End Plug**
Gentoo is out of the question if you can't use the programs you compiled on one box on another - so all of them need to be fairly identical.Otherwise you either can't optimise the progs when you compile them for the cpu or have to do something like -mcpu386 which defeats the purpose of a distro like gentoo.If you want to compile it for every box you better don't have a job or quit it - this really takes a while.On my 900duron with 512ram it takes about 20 hrs. from scratch to kde.
Suse is nice - I think - didn't use it since 7.3 but updates are a pain in the ass.
Problem with debian is that they definitely don't have the latest versions in there.
Just put something easy to administer on the boxes and make one your toy with gentoo or whatever.
BTW - if you want gentoo and kde don't bother right now.

Is there any reason for deliberately trying to sound like a prat?

I think suse has updated their auto updater pretty darn well this time.When i run it now all I have to do is vi /etc/X11/XF86Config change nv to nvidia and all works great I can play EverQuest in fullscreen, CS, and many more for me it works. I only go in like once a week or when I add seomthign and do the updates.

I added that part to my post intentionally, tounge in cheek, you know what I mean Acid. Lighten up a bit, just because I like Linux doesn't mean that I have to be a goose stepping, dry witted drone.

If my strange sense of humour offended you then I apologize and I apologize to all of those that this post did offend.

BTW I am not a child, brat or any other such nonsense. A lot of my time is consumed at work and Saturday is my only time to get on the net.

Saying that, that is the reason that I made such a clear statement as I did towards the mods. I didn't want to come back today and find that my post has been deleted or closed because of an "invalid" question. As I would need to wait another week before I had the time to get on(the net) again.

I appreciate all of the responses that I got to this query. I understand that all time is valuable, even my own, and would like to think that I didn't waste any of yours.

I am certain that I will stay with Slack but I think I will give SuSE a whirl as well as OBSD. I am also curious about Debian, I am intrigued by its history more than anything else.

I brain keeps going back to Slack though, I think that I will always have a soft mushy spot for that one. It just feels like a warm blanket, like Schroder's... .

That is enough of this partly nonsensical post.

Thanks again everyone.

P.S. Acid In the future I will take into consideration the apperance of my posts so that we can avoid any unnecessary roughness...

goose stepping?

you shouldn't be so paranoid - we try to be as helpful as possible, but it's important to keep this place pretty clean too. we're here to help, chase off script kiddies who're asking for the best way to hack their girl/boyfriend's email, and stop flame wars from happening in the first place.

don't worry about asking extremey newbi-fied questions; that's what this place is for - we hardly ever close posts... that's only for spammers, wannabe h4x0rz, or people who start personal attacks on other members or the mods.

but, to be fair to acid, and the rest of the mods, it's not particularly smart to begin criticizing the people who work the hardest to make this the best and friendliest linux forum on the net. the mods here are mods because they've been the most helpful members, and they're the ones who will freely spend thier spare time searching the net or researching strange obscure errors to help anyone who has a truly difficult problem.

anyway, feel free to ask any questions you have - as long as it's even vaguely related to linux, we'll be more than happy to toss in any help, advice, or opinions we can.