what OS to use
 

Hi,
I have taken the place of someone who has left for greener pastures. Slackware is the OS used most. I was wondering which is better Slackware or Ubuntu? Or which is better to work with.
thanks,
vader

I would say as a whole, Slackware would be more stable. Ubuntu, will be easier to use however.

Neither one is "better"---they simply have different features.

For me, Arch is the best. For you, it might be a terrible choice. The point is that you simply have to try different versions to see what best fits your brain.

Try any of the top 10 at distrowatch.com
As it happens, there is a Ubuntu LTS (long term support) that is supposed to be pretty stable.
(Obviously my vote would go to Centos ;) )

And Arch is now on that top-10 list, and Slackware is not......thereby proving:
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NOTHING!!!

My point exactly, it's entirely subjective ... just try a few until you find one that suits you.

Don't change the garden just because you're not yet familiar with the cash-crops that are planted there.

It depends what you want: do you want something stable but a little less user friendly, with a modest selection of packages? if so, slack is for you.

Do you want something easy with a ginormous selection of packages and the apt-get dependency resolver? choose ubuntu.

Want something that's dead hard and but lots of fun and super fast if you can get it to work? try gentoo.

I can't comment on Fedora, SuSE, etc. download a liveCD, and try them out! Or:
http://polishlinux.org/choose/quiz/

not the be all and end all, but helpful

hello,
Thanks for all the responses, I am still learning linux. Still don't know what direction I want to go with slackware or ubuntu. I know one thing is that I don't like to use a gui on slackware, like to use the command line better. I think, either of those two os are the choices I would like to stick with.
Thanks again,
vader

Here's a nice tutorial http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz
good luck
:)

if you want to get down and dirty with linux, id go with slackware, its more geard toward the cmdline (for the most part) Anything done in an GUI can easily be done with the cmdline. But how do you learn from a GUI, other than if i click this, this and this, it gets the job done.

ubuntu on the other hand, support for problems will be easier to find do to it being a popular distro (from my experience with ubuntu i found more GUI solutions than a cmdline one and i wanted CLI)

thereby proving that Slackware is not for the average user.

Me != average user

I have no knowledge of either, but AFAIK, Slackware is a one man effort, and Ubuntu has the huge corporate push of a rocket billionaire behind it, and I always like to support the little guy, so I'd say - go for Slackware!
(I have fond memories of it from 1996, it's the 1st distro I ever used!).

Nitpick time.....

I doubt if Slackware is really all done be ONE person....

Mark Shuttleworth made his money founding Thawte and selling it to Verisign. He spent big money to go to space IN a rocket, but I don't think he ever made any money FROM rockets.

You're correct. There's a team of people who work on Slackware with Patrick Volkerding. Several of the important people in said team post here in the Slackware forum.

...as has been explained 'better' isn't a good question, a better question is which is good for you, and that has elements that are easier for you to answer than for us. OTOH, Slackware and Ubuntu are very different takes on what a distro should do for you, and I'm a bit surprised that these two are the close competitors.

If Slack has any chance of being your sort of thing, wouldn't Debian be a better comparison than Ubuntu? Particularly if:

means that you don't like a gui at all (rather just finding the gui (which?) with slackware to be in some way 'bad').

Ubuntu certainly put effort into making the learning curve shallower, but there is clearly an argument that if you take the slack 'its easier to do it yourself, rather than fight someone else's badly thought-out attempt to automate it for you' seriously, that Ubuntu really won't be your kind of thing.

When I first converted to using *nix from windowz, I googled incessantly looking for someone to tell me which distro to use. I only realized with time and after trying out various distros that it's true that you have to pick the one that suits you best. Different distros have different applications. For most Microsoft converts starting out, I used to recommend Ubuntu, but now recommend Linux Mint, which is an even more user-friendly distro than the former. I've been using it on my family computers for a while now where the most important thing is for non-computer people to be able to intuitively use them without getting boggled by terminals.

Personally, I like to use Slackware. I find it to be very stable and full of features. The slapt-get port of aptitude makes installing packages a breeze.

For server applications I find CentOS to be one of the best. It seems to perform very efficiently and it never crashes.

thanks, pixellany, i didn't know that (about Mark Shuttleworth) :)