Since I started using Linux in 1994, I've tried Slackware,
RedHat, Caldera, SuSE and Mandrake. Out of all these
distros, Slackware has proved itself the most elegant and
reliable distro. Slack may not be suitable for the
absolute beginner or Linux newbie, since one needs to
fiddle with scripts and config files many times.

After a particularly nasty mess with RPM, I switched back
to Slackware on all my machines. Now I spend much less
time fiddling with the system (config, bugfixes, etc) and
more time actually working. The software shipped with
slack seems to be well tested and bugfixed.