I have been using Slackware for ages. The advantage for me is this: prior knowledge (it's the distro I'm most efficient in), extreme stability, blazing fast, solid/secure as a rock.
Yes, there's no official "apt" but when managing servers, I view apt as the devil. Automatic upgrades and trusting someone else's install recipes are a great way to open security vulnerabilities. I'm of the camp that everything in production is best built from source and packaged internally.
A dependency-resolving package manager is an excellent tool, but I think it's most useful application is in the desktop world. People who want software generally don't want to sit around resolving dependencies all day. People who run production servers might be better off if they knew exactly what was happening under the hood. Not to mention, once you do get your base packages set up along with Puppet, you hardly have to think about dependencies at all. Apt is great for setting a box up initially, but after that the luster wears off in my experience. Either your package manager is on the bleeding edge and unstable/insecure or it only has outdated (although probably stable/secure) packages. Slackware forces you to build and package just about everything from source, but the base system is an incredibly stable foundation.
I know quite a few people disagree with me, and that's fine. I'm not saying my way is right, I'm saying for me, this is the benefit of using Slackware in 2012 (which I do). Also, like I mentioned, once you get your base packages and something like Puppet set up, the package manager you use fades into the background.
Yes, there's no official "apt" but when managing servers, I view apt as the devil. Automatic upgrades and trusting someone else's install recipes are a great way to open security vulnerabilities. I'm of the camp that everything in production is best built from source and packaged internally.
A dependency-resolving package manager is an excellent tool, but I think it's most useful application is in the desktop world. People who want software generally don't want to sit around resolving dependencies all day. People who run production servers might be better off if they knew exactly what was happening under the hood. Not to mention, once you do get your base packages set up along with Puppet, you hardly have to think about dependencies at all. Apt is great for setting a box up initially, but after that the luster wears off in my experience. Either your package manager is on the bleeding edge and unstable/insecure or it only has outdated (although probably stable/secure) packages. Slackware forces you to build and package just about everything from source, but the base system is an incredibly stable foundation.
I know quite a few people disagree with me, and that's fine. I'm not saying my way is right, I'm saying for me, this is the benefit of using Slackware in 2012 (which I do). Also, like I mentioned, once you get your base packages and something like Puppet set up, the package manager you use fades into the background.