Arch vs Debian vs Slackware
 

Which of these 3 distros you recommend? and why?

Here's a good overview of the major distros:

http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major

"Which distro is best?" gets debated several times a day here, give the Search function a try or check out the list of Similar Threads appearing at the bottom of this page. :)

That's an impossible question. For a start, recommend to whom and for what?

The last time I tried Arch, most programs generated critical warnings when run from the CLI. I'd sooner eat slugs than have that sort of thing on my computer, yet the forum shows 44K registered users.

Debian Stable or Debian Testing? I did use Debian for all of 3 weeks once, but I couldn't get to like it, or the atmosphere of the forum. Maybe I'm just a dyed-in-the-wool Red Hat type. I've recommended Debian derivatives, but there are so many that it's difficult pick a shortlist of distros for any purpose that doesn't include at least one.

I've never recommended Slackware because it seems like too much hard work for no reason except pure dogma. But I appreciate its existence, since it makes Salix possible.

If you're running a pure window manager (openbox, fluxbox, dwm) I'd go for Arch hands down. It's just a beautiful experience in my opinion. Although I've never run any of them on Slackware. I've haven't used Slack since they offered Gnome. Slackware can be a bit of a pain to setup but once it's done it just works. The only reason I ditched it is because I like to tinker with my OS too much to run a source based distro.

Debian is a great distro - it's very reliable (the stable version - never ran testing), but personally speaking I just prefer using yum or pacman as opposed to apt. I'm just more comfortable with those package managers. It's what happens when you spend most of your 5 years Linux experience running Fedora or Arch :)

Salix is a wonderful distro though, and I highly recommend it. I used to run it on an old laptop and I almost installed Salix Xfce on my current one, but I wanted to see how well Fedora with the Gnome Shell ran on it's crappy low end hardware and I've been pleasantly surprised with it's performance so far. Although I still might install it on there someday.

The thing is that i really like all 3 of those disros, an cant decide which one to use, cos i want to stop switching between them and just have one of of them as my only os.

You COULD use all of them with triple boot and simply make a separate /home partition that all of them can use. I'm not sure what exactly you're going for here.

Yes i could, but i just want to settle down whit one distro. My criteria are i want a os thats fast, stable, has a good package management and runs xfce well.

If you want 'stable' you want Debian or Slack.

Personally never ran Slack. I installed Debian back in 2004 when XP decided it hated me. Since then I haven't messed with any other distros other than to play with one in virtualbox.

Yeah, It lean ageist Debian for me i think, so which version of debian you you recommend?

Lenny is "end of life" and Wheezy hasn't been released yet, so by the process of elimination.... Squeeze!

If you want a "stable" system you install Debian Stable/Squeeze.

If you want shiny newer apps you install Sid, but make sure you can handle when things break. For example I lost X just last week, took me half the day to figure out the problem and fix it.
The entire time I was stuck in tty because X would not load.

I use Arch on my home workstation and Debian stable on many servers. I like my home WS to be up to date, and Arch's rolling release style gets me that. Plus, I find it rather Slackware-like (text configuration, BSD style init scripts, etc.). I used to run Slack pretty heavily, but drifted away from it for various reasons. I ought to give it another try.

FWIW, I also run a heavy Scientific Linux and Ubuntu based infrastructure. I tend to use different distros for different needs.

Ive used Slackware for about 10 years.
I've 41 lan servers/gateway (2 or more lan interfaces) with Samba (sometimes as PDC sometimes not), FirebirdSQL, iptables firewall, Squid, bind+dhcp and sometimes with a virtual machine installed (debian supports vmware much better than slack) with zeroshell as captive portal.
Slack is really fast, linear, stable, but a bit rigid, difficult to implement with software not distributed with the distro, and, last but not least, is not exactly appropriate for beginners, anyway the main problem of Slackware is the "one man band" :-) manteinance
Now I'm using Debian Squeeze stable.
A bit slower than Slack (my 2 cents) many packets (unfortunately very fragmented and with "strange" names), but it's very "confortable" and well documented.
Never used Arch, but the "work in progress" (rolling release) philosofy, I think is not appropriate for servers (my 2 cents again).

Not really a one man band. Pat may be "benevolent dictator", but he does have helpers. Salix gives you Slackware with all the things beginners (and some others of us) want, plus extra software. It now comes with the Maté desktop (not to mention Ratpoison).

I have sortof made up my mind. landed on Debian stable, the only problem i that my sis graphic driver isent as good as the one in slack..