I heard mandrake is a crash machine. Well I used to use mandrake before and i had a lot of programs crash. And also, on the other side i noticed that Slackware was rated as the best Linux Distribution for 2004 in LinuxQuestions.org. What I wanna ask is,,, what is the really big difference between all the linux distributions, if they all have terminal, almost the same commands, and same GUI? Thanks for your response guys.

Some things regarding open source are to do with the culture and ethos behind a distro/software/project and so you may find particular sets of users drawn to different ones for that reason.

There are technical differences, such as the amount of packages available, release roadmaps, user support, easy of install, performance etc... but they are essentially the same software but produced and packaged in a different way.

BTW - listening to the linux show radio cast last week with Jeremy on there and one of the reasons mentioned for Slackwares win could have been due to the high volume of Slackware users on the forums (I think LQ hosts the official slackware forum?). A little off topic, but worth mentioning.

I'd call Slackware more of a guru-distro and MDK more of a newbie-distro.

Patrick Volkerding (the coordinator if Slack) is a bit conservative, meaning he's usually some versions
behind in the programs shipped with Slack. The upside of that is that Slack is potentially a bit more stable
that distros that are a bit further out on the bleeding edge (which MDK is at times). The downside is that
some nifty features might be missing in Slack.

OTOH, I've run MDK since v6.0 and found it quite stable most of the time.

- Peder

I'd say the two big things that distinguish one distro from another are:

1. The distro-specific admin tools provided (e.g. drakconf vs. yast vs. debconf vs. nothing)
2. The package format and package management tools (e.g. rpm vs. deb vs. tgz, urpmi vs. apt vs. installpkg)

Other than that, the software is basically the same.

Yeah, these forums are pretty heavy with "slackers", so it's no surprise it won the "Best Distro" title here. OTOH, Linux Format magazine ran a comparison of the major distros for it's January (I think) issue, and Mandrake won that.

For what is the difference, I think it's a combination of the culture/ethos of each distro, which drives such things as what package manager to use (rpm/deb/whatever) and the interfaces to those subsystems, e.g. the draktools.

"slackers" - I like that