I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but I've just come to the end (I think) of a 10-month Linux odyssey during which I tried almost 10 different distros before finding my home with Slackware.

I started with (1) Fedora Core, which was a good place for a true newbie. But after a few weeks, when I would try to do my own compiles, a lot of things went goofy. FC is pretty much ready to use off the rack, but in my case it stood in the way of learning about Linux.

Then I sampled (2) Suse 9.1. Very pretty, but nothing especially worth switching from FC for.

From there I tried:

[I know these are all pretty subjective evaluations from someone with slight (but growing?) technical background.]:

(3) Yoper. Very nice first impresion, cool, fast, but has some glitches, at least on my machine. Worth watching.

(4) Gentoo. Didn't get through the installation. Maybe another time when I know more what i'm doing.

(5) NavynOS. Based on Gentoo, ostensibly without some of the hurdles. Didn't install smoothly on my laptop, but it probably does well on other systems.

(6) Libranex. I got to like to apt-get with Yoper, so I tried another Debian offshoot. Too cumbersome. Huge software collection on its 4 CDs.

(7) Vidalinux. Appealed to me because it's built on Gentoo; very nice, stable, nice people behind it.. Would like a larger user base, which is a lousy reason for leaving, but ...

(8) VectorLinux. Appealed to me because it's built on Slackware; Very snappy, stable, nice people. Community is growing, but figured I need a larger user base to learn from. Had to learn about XF86Config to get it to display right on my Thinkpad's 1400x1050 screen. My favorite until I tried Slack itself. Slackware starts to lure me in via VectorLinux.

(9) Slackware 10.0 .Two failed attempts to burn decent ISOs, in spite of many successful burns with other distros. But I hung in there, reburned at 8x instead of 48x, and scored. Lot of tweaking -- redo xorg.conf, recompile kernel to add better USB support for USB mouse+trackpoint, upgrade kernel to 2.6.7, fiddle with alsa drivers, etc., etc. But, two days later and she's mine!

Maybe it's the love of the hunt or something like that, but Slack was well worth the wait -- and the trouble. It feels solid as a rock. Plus, I feel like I'm willing to get under the hood if I need to.

My 22 cents.

Your experience is quite similar to my own. I've always wanted to make sure that I find the 'best' distro and after going through many copies of several distro's, I've always come back to Slack.

Gentoo, Debian, SOL, ArchLinux .. all look like possible contenders but with the many problems I had installing, Slack although challenging at times, was always able to get it running better than any other distro.

I used to use Slack 8.0 on my 486 as a router so I had quite a bit of experience using the console only mode, never had to setup X as it only had 32 megs ram. Now that I have a better server, Slack still seems to be the best.
I had several people try to sway me towards FC1/2 but never bothered as it's just a off-shoot of RH, which I always had a distaste for. (I think it's cause of that stupid looking red hat logo)

I currently have my Toshiba PII-366 /w 128megs ram setup with Slack 10.0 with kernel 2.6.81 and everything works.. Enlightenment (too cool for words) wireless and USB setup with hardly any issues.

Now I'm looking forward to 'look under the hood' as you put it to get a better understanding of how the OS works.
Case in point, I'm trying to get my Dual PPRO 200mhz /w 512 megs ram running properly with both processors. Right now it's just working with one and everything else is fine.

Good luck in your endeavors.