Ok, I will bite. In my personal experience I have always enjoyed the straight forward approach of Slackware. In the past what has always happened to me when running Red Hat/Mandrake or even Debian was I would inevitably install a package from source and gum up the whole package system. Which, after several hours or even days of head banging, would result in a system wipe in favor of Slackware again. More recently I have moved on to Gentoo and have not looked back since. It has the straightforward simplicity of Slack and the ease of a package managed system (without a lot of the headaches of RPMs and such). Most problems with conflicting packages are easily resolved simply by setting a USE flag. Sure it takes a while to compile a new package but at least you know that it will automagically compile in support for your existing apps and leave out the incompatible stuff. There is also the fact that since you are compiling everything from source, you can build it with optimizations for your processor (though since gcc is not a great optimizing compiler YMMV). My favorite thing about Gentoo, though, is the community support. forums.gentoo.org has solved every problem I ever had with Gentoo. One stop shop for instant answers. Of course, I think most people on this list will recommend Debian which is a kick-ass distro, just not my cup of tea. I would just recommend not running Redhate based distros, I just think they break way too easily. On Sat, 2 Oct 2004 09:15:13 -0500, Patrick Hawkins <phawk42 at gmail.com> wrote: > Hello! My name is Patrick Hawkins and I just joined the mailing list > last week. I'm a relative n00b; a friend set me up with Red Hat 9 > almost a year ago and then Fedora Core 1, but I have not been active > in updating my machine. I'm thinking of switching distros, and was > wondering if anyone who has run Gentoo for a while might mention some > pros and cons of running it as compared to, say, Debian. (Those are > the two I'm considering). I don't want to start a distro-flame-war, > just some bullet point pros and cons. I've Googled some reviews, but I > was hoping for some insight from someone who had run both distros for > a while. If you've run these on laptops, that insight would be > extra-appreciated. Thanks! > > -Patrick > > p.s. For all you Slackware heads: I totally respect your distro, but I > want a more modern package-management system. > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > Help beta test TCLUG's potential new home: http://plone.mn-linux.org > Got pictures for TCLUG? Beta test http://plone.mn-linux.org/gallery > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > -- Loren H. Burlingame <loren at lhb.name> GPG Key ID: 0x112DCF4F "Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes." -William Shatner (a.k.a. Buck Murdock) _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota Help beta test TCLUG's potential new home: http://plone.mn-linux.org Got pictures for TCLUG? Beta test http://plone.mn-linux.org/gallery tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list