Hello guys. I agree with Blurry on Ubuntu being a tard slower than Vector and some other distros, but in my experience compared to the others like Fedora, Suse, and Mandrake, Ubuntu runs as fast or faster. Comparing to slack and vector , well that is a slightly different story.
But one thing that sucked me to VL and that impressed me with VL 5.1 Soho was the ability to install apps via gslapt much like synaptic in Ubuntu or the debian-based flavors.
Speed-wise Vector and other slack derivatives are better. But when it comes to ease of finding packages via the gui, nothing comes close to dapper or debian flavors to my knowledge, besides maybe PClinuxos.
VLs advantage, when something is amiss with experience you can use the message to get what is missing manually from slackit or linuxpackages. Lately, this no longer happens. I believe gslapt is really getting there. But synaptic or apt-get from debian is still more robust.
It is quite easy for me to tweak Dapper to get bleeding-edge stuff without hassles. The documentations on their wikis and forum search are near impeccable.
The ease and speed of getting bloat is fast. If I want kde 3.5.4 on my Ubuntu install, I simply go to synaptic and enter kubuntu-desktop, for xfce, xubuntu, for enlightenment, fluxbox, and more, it is all handles easily. Also when an upgrade is required you get a flashing notifier..
So I can see why many an individual use it. I often go there since that was one of the places I started off in to point others seeking more control and speed to VL.
Now what hooked me to VL was the beauty, polish, and drastic success of enlightenment on it. What tied me to it permanently, was the responsiveness of the folks here, the community, and the rate of knowledge, the user gains, not to mention the simplistic way, slack was recreated for a clueless beginner like myself to install.
Ubuntu is awesome and worry-free. Ofcourse as Blurrymind would testify, and as some other friend I know, including myself due to all the dependencies requirement, should you wish to troubleshoot a package installed wrong, this would prove more difficult than in Slack. In slack or VL, something missing for install, just find it from linuxpackages, download and install it with installpkg or pkgtool.
However, most average users do not push that envelope or get to that point.
