I am the opposite. I really can't get anything other than slackware (not that I can't work with them - I can, but life just is not as simple as slackware anywhere else). Why would anyone want or need anything more complicated then a compressed tar file for package management is beyond me.

Slackware is simple, beautiful and elegant but no more than it has to be. It just works and it leaves all the power in the world at my hands. I can make it do my bidding fast as lightning and it never gets in my way. Once you begin to get the basic principles of slack, it very closely follows the principle of least surprise.

I agree. I think that those who feel that Linux should be a "main stream" OS (for whatever definition of main stream you choose) are missing the point that it was, and always has been, primarily a hacker's OS.

That's not to say that distros like Ubuntu don't have their place, but there's so much automation going on in these "modern" package management systems that you really aren't going to learn anything. Sure, you'll end up with a very nice, very functional computer, but that (IMHO) isn't the point of Linux. I'd go so far as to say that I feel like Ubuntu is no longer "Linux", just like Mac OS X is no longer "BSD". Based on? Yes. Is? No, Slackware is Linux.

Sure Linux may be a "hackers OS", but I'd still argue the opposite.

For people who work with Linux for a living, like system administration, you want your Linux distro to absolutely minimize the amount of work needed. When your server-park scales, manually having to fiddle around 200 Slackware installations simply isn't an option.

Right, which is why you'd be using RHEL or some such. When we get into the open source world of BSDs and Linuxes, it's hard to really say what qualifies as the "OS". My point was that the original "Linux" that Linus wrote to learn more about his machine had a purpose, I think, much more in line with Slackware than SuSE/RHEL/Debian/Ubuntu/etc.

and dealing with YUM breakage is?

dealing with thousands of servers takes quite a bit of extra scripting, no matter what package management tools you use. I've used both slackware and RHEL, and while RHEL is super easy to manage when nothing goes wrong, slackware is a lot easier to fix when something does break.

As I see it, Slackware is like a clean canvas, where you can easily paint whatever you'd like. I turned my gf's laptop in a perfectly functional media player, at the same time without sacrificing those things she needs for University and stuff, like OOffice, firefox, the likes. My desktop suits my needs of development and research, the usual stuff you'd expect from a "geek". And it's still blazing fast. I'm not making the point that you can't achieve this level of versatility in any other distro, far from that, but Slack makes this considerably easier to deploy.

Slackware is really about just being able to install what you like, whatever way you want to and it will just work. There's no need to have installed by default random daemons like Cardbus.

Unlike ubuntu the other day, which felt like installing a mail server along with docbooks.

> It doesn't even have automated patch management

That's not true. You can automatically keep synced up.