Well, a LiveCD isn't really going to be that useful because as soon as you turn a plain distro into a LiveCD you have to make a ton of changes. And then you get a hundred people moaning because you didn't include a userspace driver that runs their hardware, like ndiswrapper. And you have to fix on a kernel version, because of the work to update between them every time there's a kernel release, and then you're stuck with a particular kernel and set of features to go in it.

The easiest way is to see. Personally, in your position, I'd partition a disk into three and try out "real" installs of all three. The chances are you'll choose on look-and-feel rather than capabilities because they are all capable of doing everything you need.

The snd-hda-intel module is actually part of the kernel, so has very little to do with the distro. Newer kernel = newer support for all the chips that use that module. So Slackware may ship with a slightly newer kernel that supports the thing. But if not, no matter what the distro, you'll be upgrading the kernel. You may find Slackware easier to update on the kernel side because it uses a "vanilla" kernel.org kernel. But then Debian etc. will have nice repositories that have updated kernels you can install with a few clicks. It's all pretty much individual to the particular distribution and user.

And ndiswrapper will work fine on Slackware, just the same as every other Linux distro, so long as you use recent versions of everything you need.

People confuse kernel-space, with user-space, with a particular distribution. They are not as dead-set as you think. Just because say, Distro1 didn't support your soundcard, doesn't mean that it can't. And it doesn't mean that Distro2 (where the soundcard works) is better. It just means that it shipped with a slightly different version of the kernel (newer, older, patched, not patched etc.)

The kernel is the same in all the distro's except some projects fix and stabilise on a particular kernel after months of testing, some distro's just ship whatever was most recent at the time of release, some distro's patch it heavily for "user-convenience" and thus you have to re-patch every kernel and wait for patch updates, some leave it alone.

I'd leave out such factors. The only differences to take account of are: What does it ship with? What modifications does it have (i.e. have they included ndiswrapper or do you have to get that yourself)? Does it work the way I want? Does the project update enough for me?

Personally, Slackware is my distro because it updates enough but it's so plain vanilla in its construction that I can install anything and everything in my own time too without having to re-patch or worry about the customisations (the recent Debian SSL debacle shows this quite plainly, too,). I don't care that things can't stabilise for years on end on a stagnant kernel (I like to update my kernel to each -stable release), I don't care that it doesn't come with a million third-party drivers (because my hardware is old and has Open Source drivers for everything), I don't care that it doesn't have a software repository (because I tend to want to make things from scratch anyway).

It's all a matter of personal choice that, in the end, doesn't matter a jot. Just install a bare version of all three and see how they take you. Slackware's only 5Gb or so if you install absolutely EVERYTHING, and on a modern PC that's nothing. Do it in a virtualised container under QEmu if you want to get your decision right first time. I test every new version of Slackware from my workplace's Windows machines using qemu, or I do it from my current Slackware machine using qemu+kqemu which provides a very realistic experience. You don't need to partition or anything - just create a 5Gb file when you set qemu up. If you're going to have to download the ISO's anyway, you can even just mount the ISO directly in Qemu before you waste a DVD-R burning it.

On a side-note, the only Debian-fanatic I've ever met in real life was a royal pain in the backside because he would never update ANYTHING (literally - PHP, MySQL, etc. on a hosting environment plagued by bad PHP scripts) until Debian did it because "they test on stable versions of all the software for years and are therefore more secure". I'm really tempted to give him a ring now. :-)

documented on: 2008-05-19, ledow

Keep in mind that for Slackware it is generally expected that after you install you will need to setup your xorg.conf (manually, or with a program such as xorgconfig or xorgsetup). Also, if your sound doesn't work out-of-box try running alsaconf.

As mentioned, Debian has a very slow release cycle, but is very stable. Slackware has a regular release cycle while maintaining stability. Arch has a rolling release cycle, so there are no real versions for it (just snapshots). Slackware is the only distro of those three that doesn't have dependency resolution in its native package manager. I personally like this, as I don't have to worry about my package manager ever breaking my system. As far as I know, all three have very active forums. Slackware has the smallest *official* repository and debian by far has the biggest. I recommend you look into using slackBuilds.org as a resource for your custom packages for slackware. I've also heard a lot of good things about src2pkg.

I also recommend that you install all three distros if possible. If you do this I recommend that you install their respective bootloader on their root partition and chainload from your main bootloader. That way they are kept separate. This is particularly important for distros that automagically update the bootloader config after a kernel update (I think debian does this).

documented on: 2008-05-19, shadowsnipes