Today is the first time for me to talk about Debian. It has been my favorite Linux flavor for quite some time now. I would say at least ten years, when compiling stuff became less fun and more painful, or my spare time ran out. I don't know exactly.
But whatever the cause, I ditched compiling everything in favor of the flexibility (and frustrating nature at times) of a packaging system. At that time, RPM did not prove better than Slackware's plain .tar.gz packaging and although dselect could be stubborn at times, it soon got better with apt-get and friends.
Let's add IPv6 to this landscape.