I'm going to be switching to Linux and my choices are either Debian or Slackware but I'm not sure which to choose. Gimme your opinions.

wow this hasn't been asked for a whole week nearly!

Gah!

Oops, I admit, I didn't take a look. You can close it if you like, I'll just take a look at the other threads.

Both Debian and Slackware have their advantages and disadvantages. Overall, I'd recommend both of them. For the absolute best in managing packaging dependencies between software packages, I'd pick Debian. For the system that runs Linux but most resembles UNIX in terms of where files are found, Slackware is great. Both make good platforms on which to learn, neither is necessarily the easiest to get started in initially, but both make strong, solid, stable platforms on which to do useful work.

Slackware 2.3 was the first Linux software I'd ever tried out, and the experience was good. Slackware is particularly useful if you intend to be building a lot of software yourself from compressed tar.gz files.

Debian provides a choice of building software from binary images or from a source directory with similar packaging. The apt-get command and the synaptic graphical interface are well known for their effective and fast resolution of software packaging.

Given a choice, I'd personally take Debian over Slackware today, but frankly, both are excellent. The final choice really depends on whether you want to build and manage everything yourself (Slackware) or have excellent packaging dependency resolution (Debian). Both are among the best for what they are intended to do.

They both rocks!

My opinion: Debian has the best package manager, and if you can get the durn thing installed, it's the easiest distro to upgrade. However, I've found Slackware to be the most reliable distro. Debian's complexity makes it easier to break than Slack, and since Debian stable tends to be old, you're more likely to go to unstable, which is very easy to break!

Unstable doesn't mean it'll explode when you make a typo, it just means it hasn't been tested enough by the Debian maintainers to be in the 'stable' stream.
Programs that are marked 'unstable' are even available as plain rpm's that people install as soon as they come out.

I've not found the unstable tree to be unstable at all, as far as the packages are concerned. Occasionally, though, I do run across packaging errors when a new set of packages come out. Generally those kinds of problems are fixed relatively soon though.

"Unstable" means unpredicable! As a general rule, Debian unstable is at least as reliable as RedHat/Mandrake release versions. However, if you try it at the wrong time, you can foobar your system.

What I really like about Debian packaging is that I can readily try stuff out, and if it works, great, I have the latest and greatest package. If it doesn't work, I can back out what I've done.

I can still install and build packages from source, too, though that does tend to defeat the purpose of package and dependency management. But my point is that with Debian, I have a great deal of flexibility, and even when something fails, there are much better mechanisms than with most other approaches for backing off what you've changed and putting back in something that works reliably.

Stable is definitely very stable; never seen a major problem with it. Testing hasn't been thoroughly and rigorously tested, but it tends to be quite usable. Even unstable can often be useful. Using a combination of these three source and binary trees can yield some pretty useful and up to date software.
Getting the latest apt.org source list locations enables me to get the very latest of just about any software I may need, and in fact, when I want to test a new release of something, I generally test it with Debian first.

I only know debian. And that realy rocks. I haven't tried slack so I can't say any thing about that.

if i was you I would go if I had the chose with debian. Ap get is way too cool and it is all you ever need... no searching involved just one program.

I'd say Slackware, 'cause I don't like packages at all (except *.tgz).