I am thinking of building another linux box or rebuilding an older one
can someone point out the pros and ons of these distro's


thanks

here's a nice paper on debian called "why debian":

http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/t...bian/talk.html

i haven't found an equivalent paper for slackware, though... if anyone has a link to a slackware advocacy paper please do share...

i'd say that, in a nutshell (and IMHO), debian's greatest pro is it's rock-solid stability... the fact that after they make a stable release only critical patches are provided (no new features) is a great thing, specially for mission-critical environments where stability is paramount... also, the huge package developer/maintainer community that debian has is one of it's strongest features IMHO... plus the amount of testing that goes into the packages, etc... there's a lot to like in debian (and in slackware also, of course)...

slackware... IMHO it's greatest pro is it's uber-simple design... slackware sticks to the KISS principle and that's something that most slackers really appreciate... it uses a BSD-ish init system and the package format is basically gzipped binary tarballs... no (official) fancy automagical package manager... all in all, it's kinda hard to explain exactly why slackware is so delicious... maybe it's the way in which the slackware maintainer does his thing and has been doing it for over 10 years... maybe it's the educational experience of doing all the system administration tasks from the CLI... maybe it's the modern (compared to debian stable/testing) vanilla-flavored assortment of packages it comes with... also maybe the big user community here at LQ in the slackware forum... it could be many things...

one thing i know for sure is that debian and slackware do a lot of things differently and honestly i think that's a good thing for both of them... i mean, there's situations when debian is probably the best option, and there's situations when slackware is probably the one...

which one are you currently most interested in?? why??

Hi,

I do think that, being the 2 oldest distros out there Debian and Slackware, both in their respective
fields, which win32sux, has nicely outlined, are the best, because they are base distros, which have
been polished and refined to reach a kind of relative perfection.

cheers

Use the one your most familiar with. Why do members here have to act like salesmen with a pitch? Try them both out for crying out loud and choose the one you like best..

PS. Also moving to Distributions forum where these questions like this are asked all the freaking time..

Have you ever seen any salesman trying to sell something for free ?I never have..

I am impartial to Slackware cause the vanilla flavor of it helps difficult tasks like compiling a module for a LT linmodem easier.

Slackware has that raw power where as Debian has that killer Package Manager.

Thanks guys

I am using gentoo at this time on a box and pretty happy for the most part. Building another box and thinking of going with slack because of it vanilla nature.

Thanks for the input