I also had my phase of moving to another distro. It was around 2003 I think, when I moved to another department at work where everything was based on Red Hat. I had used Slackware for several years so I did know a thing or two about Linux, but decided to try Red Hat at home. I think it was 7.2 but I am too lazy to check now (1:00am here).
My first experience was not that bad, but I was just a bit confused. And when Red Hat became commercial, I felt I was using the wrong operating system so switched back to Slackware.

Then I realized I had been happy but had not realized it. With Slackware I felt at home again, "in control". I am a command-line person, I configure my systems with VI, no need for fancy GUI-tools. Actually, I don't trust them - after configuring something from a GUI tool I check the whatever-dot-conf files to see what happened

Now I do check out other Unices once in a while. I know many Slackers don't like Debian, but I do follow their releases in a virtual machine. I also follow FreeBSD, since the days of Walnut Creek (for the younglings: that's the company that distributed Slackware some years ago and also distributed FreeBSD).

But there is nothing like Slackware for me...

My wife runs a Debian 4.0 box, it runs well. I flirt with FreeBSD, and dual boot Slackware 12.1 and FreeBSD 7.0 on one of my Slackware 12.1 boxes.
Slackware will always be my first love:-)

Really ? Well, it can be if you set it up right.

As far as I'm concerned, all other distros I've tried just seem boring compared to Slackware. I still haven't got round to trying Arch, Gentoo, or LFS yet. But I'm definitely getting bored with Debian and its many offshoots. Only briefly tried Fedora, Mandriva, OpenSuse, etc - no thanks. If other people like to use those distros - OK - this is just my personal opinion.

LFS & BLFS are interesting, at least as a learning experience.
It is nice to have a working setup at the end and have that feeling like "hey, I built my own Linux!".
It is still on a partition on my hard drive, but do not really use it.

Not a fair comparison I guess since the two are setup differently, running different software and services etc... Still though, you'd think that having KDE compiled from scratch with only the needed parts of it installed would make a big difference, but no, not that I've noticed anyways.

Next project will be LFS

I've heard some talk on here before of recompiling (essentially "Gentoo-izing") Slackware... I'm thinking of that as well.

haha

Ubuntu was how I got into linux, so I have to say it's a good thing, and it's still one of my favourite distros, but that's probably because I actually know how to use it, unlike most other *nixes out there.

I'm still in my first week of slackware, although I did use puppy for a few months not so long ago. Slack is a great distro so far, and beats the crap out of Suse (open and enterprise) both of which made me want to vomit blood, and Opensolaris which was utterly frustrating and disappointing.

I agree with the comment that linux distros seem to becoming more and more closed up, and niche forming.

The one thing I am still very keen to try is some variant of BSD, but for now, Slack suits me just fine.

Since my last post in this thread I've removed my Debian and FreeBSD installations. Nothing at all wrong with Debian and FreeBSD. It is wonderful to maintain 4 Slackware PCs.
Simplicity is divine.
I'm a Slacker.

i've had slackware 12.2 installed on my hard drive for a good while, but have just recently started doing much with it. I really just got started with linux in general about 3 months ago, so i've been a little bit intimidated about trying slackware.

I started off with Ubuntu and Fedora thinking that i'd learn from them and progress into slackware, gentoo, etc, but both of those OS's drove me nuts with updates and such, not to mention that i never could get Ubuntu to like anything with flash in it.

So, now having at least figured out how to install programs using slackbuilds and such I feel a small bit of achievement in learning something useful.

The problem i'm now perplexed with is whether or not to put slackware on my laptop that has a well functioning Debian Lenny install, or to leave it alone. I don't know if I'm ready to tackle getting my wireless card to work in slackware or not since the broadcom wireless cards are generally speaking a pain in the rear. But, I'm definitely liking slackware enough that it is tempting to try it on the laptop as well, and learn as I go.

Actually, broadcom has come a long way since the release of the 2.6.26 kernel. I would recommend checking out www.linuxwireless.org for help with broadcom since you have to hack and slash some firmware with a program.

So far I have played with Ubuntu and CentOS since my last post in here. I must say that I still prefer the simplicity of Slackware and the non-gui installer. Makes me feel more at home.

i've installed slackware on the laptop now, and trying to get the wireless up and running...i'll start another thread with where i'm at in the process to avoid hijacking this one

Yeah I have broadcom in my ASUS laptop and once the firmware is in place wicd handles everything perfectly.

Look for fwcutter

haha, right on!!