Slackware is my distro of choice. I am a sysadmin recently turn developer and find Slackware to be a very complete package. Some note able points are that its tgz packages are quite simple. There is no dependency checking built into them which is good for me because I like to build some things and rpm/tgz others and I am not stuck with only using the package manager to install software when I need an update. Slackware also comes with a tool to convert rpms to tgz so you can grab your fav rpms and install them on your Slackware box as tgz's. In production env's I have always exported /usr/local and managed pages with stow. Being a sysadmin the 1st place I go to on any distro is the etc dir. Slackware uses old style bsd rc scripts for startup which are all well documented and easy to read. You can also use the more recent sys V init.d if you chose. Network config is also done through the rc.d init scripts and they are all well documented with examples and comments. I find this much cleaner then the nasty poorly documented /etc/sysconfig/* mess you see with RedHat that requires the use of a set of broken Python scripts to manage it. They also use a nice rc script to manage module loading as well so you will never get screwed when modutils changes its format or reads a new config file which it has done at every major Linux release i.e. 2.2, 2.4 and now 2.6. The installer is dated compared to the likes of many graphical installs but it does the job just fine. It is not nearly as painful as the Debian installer. But no where near as good as RH. The latest version of Slackware 9.1 which I recently installed on my laptop has all the features and support you see in every other major distro with a few extras. 9.1 comes with the 2.4.22, jdk(I am a Java guy), 2.6 kernel ready(this means updated modutils etc..), GNOME 2.4, (not your favorite desktop but it has become much more responsive and less memory intensive with this release), XFce, WindowMaker, etc... You can chose resier or ext2/3 at install and supports xfs and jfs. Latest GTK. No need to update ssh yet! as it ships w/ the latest. So thats my Slackware advertisement. To be fair there are advantages and disadvantage to any distro and if you are out to try something new give Slackware a try. Matt