I started with Redhat, then SuSE, then Mandrake, then Slackware then Knoppix, then Dedian, then Gentoo, the FreeBSD, and some other distro's and finaly stoped at Slackware with swaret and checkinstall.
Swaret does about the same thing as apt-get, and with checkinstall i can compile wathever i want and have it installed as a package (checkinstall works also for deb and rpm).
What i do like about this config is that it is easy to keep my system up to date and compile wathever i want. This is also the great thing about Slackware, whatever you give it to it will compile.