which distro should i use?

[paullyo]

Howdy folks,
I've been using Slackware since 7.0, thought about maybe giving another distro a try. I can't seem to download all 4 cd's without them being corrupt. Maybe Gentoo? Debian? Anything else sort of like Slackware? But then again knowing myself I'll probably end up staying with slack but I thought I'd test waters......

thanks
paul

[fatTrav]

set up 3 partitions and test all 3 out! how are you d/l'ing slack10? i used bit torrent and had no problems. I've had good luck this this mirror: http://ftp.cerias.purdue.edu/pub/os/slackware/slackware-10.0-iso/

[Unwritten]

Yeah, testing all the distro's would be a very good idea.. If your asking for a recommendation, id say gentoo. Most efficient linux distro i've ever used..

[madcompnerd]

I should take this oppurtunity to pimp Arch, if you like Slackware you will probably also enjoy the simplicity of Arch.

Arch, not Ark...

[serz]

Those three are good options. But keep in mind that Arch Linux is i686 optimized.

[squeegy]

Lately I've used Gentoo, Debian, and recently just installed Slackware 10.0 (upgraded to current). Granted, I've only been using slackware for about a day total, I think I like it more than all the others listed, especially for a desktop computer.

I found myself spending far too much time messing around with Gentoo, not necessarily a bad thing, but couple that with long compile times, and it just took up too much time for me.

I found that I like Debian a lot for a server enviroment. I've been using woody on my servers for quite some time with very good results. Personally I feel that Debian doesn't make such a great desktop distro, packages are not as recent as slackware or gentoo, even in the unstable branch. However, a new debian based distro called Ubuntu has come about, and supposedly it is what debian should be like for the desktop. I haven't had time to try it out yet, but I have high hopes.

Slackware seems like the perfect middle ground for me, binary packages, ability to easily compile from source and install with checkinstall (so I can use on other machines). Plus the fact that the packages in current are pretty up to date, and I can grab a lot of things from linuxpackages.net.

This is all just my opinion, so lets keep the flames to a minimum.

[CoffeeMan]

Gentoo, Debian, and Gnubian

[paullyo]

Yeah maybe I should just use a few partitions and try them out

paul

[saikee]

By all means try them out and change the question

"Which distro should I NOT use?"

Beware of Lilo can have a problem breaching the 16 partitions barrier.

Grub can go much higher but its distro may not have been written to reach double digit partition number either.

Got a hard drive with 41 partitions. The only daring Linux willing to go to the far end in Suse 9.1. Many distros got scared and refused to be installed, even at lower partitions.

[mmills]

ubuntu is a nice new distro........
CCux is pretty sharp...........
Slackware is always a good way to go......

[fill]

I cast my vote for debian, or any one of it's derivitives(ububto), because of it's handy package management system, and because you don't have to wait for things to compile(gentoo).