OT Was: Advise on linux for a newbie

Fortunately, "usually" doesn't always translate into "always".

....both of which are unix scripts.

I definitely have to disagree on this one, at least from a learning standpoint. How is one to understand dependencies if one never deals with them?

I think the key here is interaction with the OS at the lowest level. Slackware is more like unix in the sense one has to directly interact with the basic underlying code. Unix is essentially made up of programming and shell scripts. Slackware takes this same hands-on approach, providing little in the way of point-click interfaces to ease the effort-understanding required. It forces one to understand the what, why, and how things are accomplished at the code level. Some may find this annoying or non-educational. I don't. I learned more in 6 mos of Slack than 2 yrs of RH-MDRK-CLDRA. I think anyone who puts their mind to it will, too.

As a postscript, I recently set up an OpenBSD server. Piece of cake! What a great package manager So easy, it's scary. But, after having learned to do compile from source (thanks Slack), it's all guilt free icing. ;)

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