I have today looked back over the archives of the ALUG Main Lists. I see that I started, June-July 2001, with trying to get Mandrake to install, (new IDE cables cured the fault I seem to remember), but within that time I'd moved on to Red Hat, was pleased that it went in and worked didn't like it and had moved on to Slackware by December. Since then I've kept having tries at Debian. It was an ambition to get Debian installed, for the last week I've had it running and as long as one sticks to using KDE, there seems to be no recognisable difference between the two both stable both what I'm used to.
I have however taken Debian out and re-installed the base system. I'd like to know if there is a way of getting what I have with Slackware, a text log-in for both user and root with the ability to switch to a GUI by using <startx>, and how does one get rid of the Gnome? There seems to be an awful lot of other stuff in there that Slackware doesn't seem to need to provide the same apps, are all these dependencies really necessary?