[ale] Slackware questions for Slackware users

[Greg]

I should preface this to say that I honestly hope that this does not devolve
into some distro religious war or a thread hi-jacking into religion,
politics, or any other discussion.  I would like to find out more about
*this exact* distro before going to the trouble of downloading an ISO and
playing with it.

I have only tried Mandrake (3 yrs ago), RH 7.3, and Suse 8.2 and OpenBSD -
so I have some questions about the Slackware Linux distro.  I am looking for
some type of Linux distro that is less commercial than RH, Suse, etc.. to
run on servers.

1.  What do you think are the main differences between Slackware and the
rest ?

2.  How do you update ? is this the one that uses the apt-get stuff or is it
via rpm's ?  The website only had a package/port  installer that looked
similar to the BSD type system - which is fine by me.

3. Can a base install of only the kernel be achieved, without all of the
unneeded (by me) crap of Sendmail, bind, mutt, etc., etc, .... ?

4.  What is it about Slackware that you prefer to run it over other distros
?

Thanks to all that reply,

Greg