I just downloaded and installed the first three discs of Slackware 12.1 selecting packages during the installation using the menu option.

This is a brilliant operating system, it's very fast, very stable and the closed source ATI Driver works perfectly without any tweaking needed. I think this is the only distribution which properly detects my monitor too.

I'm also pleased with the way that the installer allowed me to choose packages along the way, however I'm not sure how to remove KDE components I don't need such as kopete, kontact etc...

It's not as hard as I heard to get anything done, I don't know why this is a common thing I hear about Slack, it's just as easy as any distro. Just a little bit of research and Repositories, Swaret and updates were set up. Easy.

Installing tgz packages are easier than installing .debs or .rpms IMO and it is certainly faster at doing so. For example Firefox 3 tgz took no more than a second to install.

LILO successfully detected my partitions and works great.

Changing init so that KDE would launch on startup was easy as well, this is a nice solid, stable OS which is very fast.