The reason I gave up on Debian was because Debian was always off doing its own thing (changing default locations, changing how config files were put together, a

The reason I gave up on Debian was because Debian was always off doing its own thing (changing default locations, changing how config files were put together, and so on). Slackware was really close to what you'd get if you downloaded the original authors' tarballs and did a ./configure; make; make install. I think this is particularly relevant to servers. I was always fighting with Debian's ideas of how things should be. Hopefully that's changed in the meantime.