Some comparisons

Slackware vs Red Hat Linux

Advantages of Slackware

• Installs in only 4MB RAM (Red Hat needs 8MB)
• Can install from a stack of floppy disks
• Much better 'rescue' disk

Advantages of Red Hat

• rpm, rpm, rpm (The Red Hat Package Manager)
• Upgrading of packages in a "live" system is straightforward; changes in configuration files are detected and saved
• Upgrading to a new major release can be done without wiping your system
• Packages contain descriptive information which can be queried even before they are installed
• Packages have checksums for all files, allowing system verification
• Faster and more robust installation procedure, single floppy disk
• A single generic kernel plus loadable modules
• Did I mention rpm?

FreeBSD vs Linux

Advantages of FreeBSD

• Shadow passwords (with MD5 - unlimited length passwords) "out of the box"
• One-time passwords easily installed
• Device-drivers easily enabled/disabled or Base/IRQ changed, at boot time
• Consistent auto-build of packages, using original sources plus diffs (rpm does this too)
• Console scrollback is better; works when you switch vc's
• Less restrictive copyright encourages commercial applications
• Arguably more Unix-like because of its BSD pedigree

Advantages of Linux

• More GNU software installed by default. (With FreeBSD you have to manually install essentials such as 'bash', 'less' etc, and they annoyingly go into /usr/local)
• More driver support (e.g. SDLcomm/N2 card)
• Faster development
• Higher performance?
• IP masquerading, AX25 support; generally lots of cool kernel features (FreeBSD 2.2 has "IP alias" feature equivalent to IP masquerading, but for ppp connections only)
• dosemu and generally lots of cool applications
• LILO is better than FreeBSD BootManager
• Console is vt100-compatible
• Uses standard disk partitioning and simpler names for partitions
• Huge established user base