...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)