And with Gentoo. Not trying to start a Distro flamewar, but if someone wants to learn distro independent Linux, then he or she should try his or her hands on LFS. The next best thing after LFS would be Gentoo.
Distro wars was why I was trying my hardest not to comment.
Personally if someone would have put LFS in front of me when I was just starting out with Linux, I would have freaked out. It's just too complex (although not complicated) to get up and running. But it's a good learning experience once you're comfortable with the basics.
As for Arch, it was one of my stops when I migrated away from Slackware, and while it's very similar in some aspects, I feel it has an added layer of fat that's missing from plain Slack and its one man vision of what a distro should be.
YMMV and all that, but IMHO Slackware is a Goldilocks distro. It maximizes learning without the pain of being overly onerous.
Thank you for the post and the comments. I am a new Arch user (having used it for about 6 months now), and while I am happy with it, your comments are making me want to try other bare distros like Slackware or Linux From Scratch.
