I'm fairly new to Linux, but I have become fairly adept with it, still learning many of the command line commands, but I'm getting pretty good. I have used Mandrake 10.1 and Mandriva 2005 LE since I became a Linux user and I just wanted to ask a general question to you all. Including hardware support, packaged software, rpm support, stability and ease of use, which one should I use, Slackware 10.2 or should I keep Mandriva 2005 LE? Also, since I have never moved out of the Mandriva section I am unsure, but can I keep my personal documents and not "format" my hard drive? Can I just "upgrade" and switch all of the system files over to Slackware?

I think that it depends on what you want to do with the PC and how stable it currently is. If Mandriva provides what you need and does not crash, I would personally stick to it. Slackware is known that it's a bit more hardcore (e.g as far as I remember my version did not come with openoffice).

If you know what you're doing, you can keep it. However, there's always a chance that something goes wrong (power failure, you've made the wrong choice), it's still advised to create a backup.

for me , i never had intention to upgrade my linux and what i tell u here is my own opinion
once i am thinking the linux i use need to upgrade ( once a year ) i transfer /home files to another drive then start fresh install and from another drive i copy back what i need , because in old /home there many thousand of rubish

ok here about mandy and slackware , sorry i never use mandy so cant give comment but i am full time slackware and fedora user, my ideas for me slackware goes to server ( no gui ) and desktop goes to fedora ( sorry again do not flame me because of this , because this is me ) yours is yours keep it

If Mandriva works fine for you then I don't see any point of changing it. Slackware is a good distro, which you can learn a lot from if you are prepared to do a lot of manual configuration and tweaking (no fancy gui control centres like Mandriva or Suse), so its worth taking a look it, but not necessarily as a replacement for your current distro.

Why choose when you can multiboot ? In the 2 posts above I count 8 OS's.

If your /home dir is on a separate partition to the system files you will be able to just use that partition for /home on Slackware. Otherwise if /home is on the same partition as / (root) then you will need to copy all the files elsewhere so you don't lose them