Heh!
Yes indeed, @fishope, Ubuntu is travelling its own road now... (their privilege, of course)
Love the way that Debian is such a broad community - although the systemd thing is kinda worrying. Must have a go with Devuan.
Not a fan of systemd but I also recall when SysV was new and shiny, and less-than-friendly compared with old familiar BSD.

"Runlevel? Whyfor we need this runlevel?" Well, that's how I felt at first....
Our local guru had me sorted out in half an hour on the 32032 box.
The wheel turns...

I love how we can look back on past years and use anyone of the distros. Big business would rater throwout their old gear than refurbish and sell due to security and I'll be there! Wait that sounds bad in my tiny white hat.

Rogue Linux was OK on the T20 but slow so now from the old spindles KateOS 3.6,
sweet!

Slackware isn't for everyone. Slackware is not about bleeding edge and eye candy, it is about reliability, stability, and flexibility. You need to do a bit of "think for yourself" to manage Slackware. Want the latest nVidia driver? Go to their website and get it yourself. Want the bleeding edge kernel? I can install it and have it up and running in less than an hour, and it works (at least the current stable version 3.18.1 works, future versions, well, YMMV).

For me it just clicks. I hate overbearing over controlling distros. I don't need bleeding edge, I don't need fancy package managers that try to think for me, I need something that stays out of my way but still gets the job done.

I do *everything* with Slackware, from gaming (Slackware makes an *excellent* gaming machine!) to running a dozen or so app/web/db servers (with 100% uptime using my own configured and installed php/mysql/apache because I don't have to use the distro supplied versions if I don't want something newer - I'm running php 5.6.2 on my production servers and it is rock solid) along with several dev machines. My 16 year old daughter even uses Slackware and already hates Windows. My other girls use Windows and hate it. But this flexibility doesn't come at a price, Slackware is rock solid for all of these functions. Slackware doesn't have a "server version" because the out of the box version is excellent for running servers.

Disclaimer: I've used Slackware for about ten years, and am moderately experienced with it. Those with the same experience with other distros should be able to do at least as much with their distro of choice, as I do with Slackware.

The beautiful thing about Linux is that there are distros for those that can't do the things I can do. There are distros for those that are far smarter and far more capable than I am, and there are distros for those that don't know how to find dependencies or install a video driver, there are distros for those that want bleeding edge eye candy, there are distros for those that want to do everything themselves, there are distros for those that can't do anything for themselves.

Windows is a single bloated over-engineered homogenized controlled experience. Microsoft doesn't understand the word "flexibility". With Microsoft, it's our way or the highway and if it crashes regularly, too bad. You don't like what we did to the gui? Too bad.

With Linux it's any way you want it.

1 members found this post helpful.

Haha...OK, I've had my fair share of trouble with Debian. Missing deps, broken packages, seems like they're focusing on quantity not quality. Same with Ubuntu, the only difference is Ubuntu is nicer in the things that work. Just my two cents.

I'm with Albinard.

I am no guru. But I just feel I know Slackware.

My experience is different.
When I was using Ubuntu, I was having to resolve some weird issue every other week. Since I've been using Crunchbang, a minimalist variant of Debian, I've had smooth sailing and only rare issues that are usually caused by some corporation or Government department insisting on requiring propriety software to perform mundane tasks. :P

Xubuntu

Quantity is what I like (running anything old too bleeding edge,) in a truly free world of course there's work...

Yep!

for ease of use: Linux Mint KDE
for not forcing systemd down my throat: PCLinuxOS KDE

Arch for my system - and for my Pi, my sister and a friend both use Manjaro (derived from Arch)

Archlinux is the best Linux distro that I have ever used. Head and shoulders above the rest. Especially the documentation on https://wiki.archlinux.org

I think reliability, stability, and simplicity make a distribution worthwhile. Bleeding edge, radical design, and over usage of complexity make for a mixed bag. Some levels of these can make a distribution unique, ground breaking, and powerful, but you have to use great care, but above all else, the core of the system has to be stable.

The good thing about Slackware is, you can make it flexible with some effort. Sbotools on Slackbuilds.org adds in a ports style package handler for extra packages from slackbuilds.org, plus slackpkg+ adds in support for 3rd party repositories. You can even add slapt-get and gslapt for an apt/aptitude style package management system. Sbotools and others add in some level of dependency resolution as well, minimal, but effective resolution.

1 members found this post helpful.

Of course you don't...

http://catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/