Slack is a great learning tool and it's stable. I run other distros as well, but Slack is my mainstay.

Slack really rocks.

I tried Redhat 7.3, Gentoo 2004.1, ubuntu LiveCD, FreeBSD 5.3 LiveCD and Slackware 9.1 , 10.0 and 10.1.

Redhat
Many GUI frontend available and it was the first distro to use. It was good for beginners. However, I did not learn anything about linux. It is so windoze-like, soon I started thinking of using other distros.

Gentoo
Nice distro, Good portage. Spent around 1 day on compilation but only lasted for 2 days. In these 2 days, I just try to make sure my compilation flags are not either missing or mis-configured. At the last day, I was convinced to give Slackware a try because both gives similar performance.

FreeBSD LiveCD
Freesbie is nice. A nice, great support and ready-to-use distro, however, I seldom use it as I found myself there is too little time left on investigating into it. Know a Chinese saying: "Taking care of one thing while another at the same time will make you lost"? Being "half a and half an expert", I dun want it to be happen on me.

Ubuntu LiveCD
Tried 4.x and 5.x. 4.x gave me bad impression since it loads for 3 minutes to get everything up. Gosh.. It took much longer than that in windoze I have ever used. 5.x, Woo. A nice improvement on start up, 2.6.9 GNONE, Firefox 1.0, Gaim 1.1.0, etc. Give it a try! Still I gave it up cause I personally dun want to load a bloated windoze-like WM in my PC.

Slackware
Finally, here comes the big fan!
What other said in this thread is part of my words, I would not repeat them again. One thing bears repearting is Slacker's rule: KISS. Now I feel excited in writing the 'pros' of slackware, sorry for being shy here.

And it's time for others to voice out their comments.

great tool for learning!

Hmmm, Suse guy? I have run both Mandrake and Debian as my main system for over a year at different times. My first experience with FreeBSD was using it to run my first attempt at a webserver on an old (headless after install) 16MB Pentium PC. I also fooled with running news on it. But yes, it is not unusual to need to hit the docs when I try something new with FreeBSD. At work I have a 48MB Pentium running Debian with 8 VT terminals connected to it that does some inventory. The Slackware difficulties have hit me at the wrong time. Needing to compile a kernel module before I did such things, needing to replace a modem string when it was not even obvious that was the solution, having a probably mismatched kernel and compiler version when I wanted to compile a kernel for a homemade boot floppy. I had been working on keeping my current Slackware version up to date with patches when Patrick became ill and no more security patches have shown up on the Slackware site since. At first a couple sites said they would have patches and then Patrick endorsed one himself. I will see what happens when I install 10.1 to the new PC I am building, along with Sarge when it goes stable, Solaris 10, and lord knows what else.

No offense meant, I use SuSE myself if it is appropriate. I also looked into FreeBSD and didn't like it, that's why I was wondering what kept you interest there.

Slackware has been my distro of choice since 8.0, and i have tried Suse, mandrake, and gentoo thinking i might like them better, and in less then a week i would be back with slack installed and working flawlessly.......and it is the most unix-like, and the people who use slack are always the most helpful because they all know where things are and how to configure them because it is exactlyt he same on virtually every machine

No offense taken.
When I ran FreeBSD on my first home server it was to try out a Unix. I became more interested at the beginning of the SCO nonsense when it appeared possible there could be problems with Linux.

No, not trolling. I even said that these problems are even more prevelant in Gentoo. But I have my Gentoo working, and that took a lot of work. If I am going to switch distros I don't want to go through that again. Furthermore, that wasn't the only reason I gave. It's waay slower than Gentoo and it takes *forever* to boot, whereas my Gentoo partion gets me to a ~/ prompt in an insanely short amount of time.

By the way, most of the reasons given are also reasons for using Gentoo. And, also, portage rules!

I use Slack for the same reasons as mentioned above:
stable
fast
VERY good support group
helps you learn linux and isn't full of bloatware to slow down your system.

I'm on my first gentoo install and I've had it running for a couple months now. I'm _incredibly_ impressed with portage. But... it's Gentoo. If you have time to kill, then it's ok, but compiling everything is really time consuming--no doubt about it. That said, I will probably keep using Gentoo for my day to day desktop system.

And now for the Slack plug. I had been using slack for almost two years before trying Gentoo. Slack is by far the cleanest distro out there. And for that reason, it's really easy to learn how stuff works, where stuff goes, etc. etc. It's easily the best layout of any distro I've ever used. Without Slack, I wouldn't know 1/8 of what I do now. And I still use it on my laptop because it _works_. Without days of compiling.

Certain distros are better at certain things. Gentoo on my desktop seems like a pretty sure bet. I had no trouble getting hardware working (although I didn't have to worry about an ATI video card), anything I need is one "emerge" away--no worries about dependencies, etc. Everything just works. I can't complain about that.

But on my laptop, I'll keep Slackware. I can have a fresh install up and running flawessly in about half an hour. And if I need a new program, I don't have to set it aside and wait for it to compile--I can grab a binary and have the program installed in minutes. With any research at all, dependencies are no problem. And there's never any mystery as to where something is installed or where something should be located. Talk about simplicity.

Hmm...that's probably enough rambling out of me---everybody else here has pretty much summed it up: Slack is great.

well i guess thats where knowledge comes in or maybe if u actually read "man rpm" then u would've known... eg:

slackware is the best for me (which is newbie), really
i really recommend it for linux newbie, just make sure that you have some computer background/knowledge.

but, actually i'm worried that slackware will no longer KISS since it now need 2 cd's (yes, yes, i know i can just get the first cd)

Azmeen is right: RPMs must die.
Also: Window$ must die. M$ must die. Mandrake must die first of all!

Slackware has used 2 CDs for some time - the second being necessary only if you want KDE or Gnome.

Slack has been going on KISS for 12 years now - I somehow don't see that changing anytime soon.

This is getting really annoying. Mr Kornerr would you please stop saying such things. Does not do you any credit !