Oddly i feel compelled to reply to this thread, first of all i havn't had a chance to try out debian tho i plan to one of these days. For now i like slack and it seems to work great for me, i'm a super newb just kinda bumbling around blindly and so far things have just seemed to work just fine in slack and the only time i really busted it was while trying to dissable gnome 2.2's gdm. Debians Packages seem like a great idea but it seems the most problems i've had with installs is with my radeon driver not quite working anymore. Anyways i bring this up because i don't think drivers come in .deb's which would be nice.. but anyways. As for Redhat/Mandrake they are good newbie distros, i'm glad i ran each for about a day before formating and switching to slack. The one thing i've liked about slack is it was very easy to install, i like the idea of just having to d/l one cd and going with a pretty minimal install and then just upgrading packages myself. One last thing, a few post back someone mentioned wishing kde 3.1 and gnome where easy to install on slack... well they are, check out dropline-gnome and you can d/l tgz's for kde 3.1 (about 20 of em) to a dir then just use pkgtool, worked great for me, anyways as always just my newbie ramblings.

Well, here's my .02$
I have had nothing but probs with Debian and Gentoo.
the installers are garbage, and Gentoo hosed my reiserFS and ext3 file systems more than once. I once had to goto IBM site and d/l some tools to fix a new 40 gig drive because Debian installer rendered it UN-readable and UN-useable!! So I have stuck with Slackware ever since. have used Slack since 8.0 came out.

I tried Debian, and had fits. So I tried Slack. Now I'm changing all my systems to Slack.

Slack was ok for me...Tried peanut at first on an old laptop and then Slack 8 on a desktop....

But Debian is really impressing me now with apt-get and synaptic...

Though close, Slackware is my preference due to it's minimal amount of software at install. I don't care about the package comparisons.

I guess I just don't understand what you people mean when saying that debian installs more software than Slack especially since you can choose which software to install from the very beginning. In all of my Debian installs I've started out with a base install and used apt to get just the software I wanted.

Slack 4 cds; Debian 7

So, you only need one Debian CD to install a base system. If your lucky enough to have a nice speed connection you can pick and choose more as you see fit. More software options doesn't mean you have to load more either.

Use a distro that has 7 CDs? Uhh, no. That alone bothers me and would get on my nerves. I can picture myself not being able to sit at the debian box without obsessing the 7 CD thing.

See - that's what being uninformed is all about - nobody here except guys that want to run servers want the stable distro and thats what is on the seven CD's plus you only need the first CD. This is not rpm-land or something without package management - you just get networking going and install what you need from there.

Agreed, if your acctually going to run debian then don't run woody unless you are extra paranoid about security or somthing like that, and if your acctually that paranoid your problably wearing a tin foil helmet right now to keep microsoft from reading your brainwaves. The net installer for debian kinda sux, but once you get it working its a cool idea. As for the debian vs Slack thing.. debiain is an good distro, i was a bit dissapointed, apt-get and the package mangement isn't as good as advertised, i still prefer slack or gentoo.

Well, as a newbie, I really shouldn't have much to say, but...
I recently got mandrake 9.1beta3 to work on my box, and as of ten minutes ago I installed Liobranet(debian based clone) on to the same box. So far it looks good, at least I can read what I am typing here.
The install went smooth and easy, no problem with hardware recognition, and I will soon see if I can screw it up too.. ~