A recent surge of over a thousand new Slackware registrations have put Slackware in second place behind only Ubuntu in the number of computers running Slackware registered at linuxcounter.net. Here is the link https://www.linuxcounter.net/distributions/stats.html This list is user submitted and does not accurately reflect the number of users worldwide, but it does tell how many people care enough about their distro(s) to register their computers. IMO the list has a greater percentage of users on the "harder" distros than users as a whole. Notice, Gentoo ahead of Linux Mint. But, neither is Distrowatch's PHD an accurate reflection of the number of users. I have registered my Slackware computer with lico over a month ago. I recommend you should register your linux box too. You can keep some information which lico requests about your computer secret if you like, but you should at least make public your distro and version number with linuxcounter.net .

I'm going to guess most folks using RHEL in Corporations/Organizations do NOT register their distro because they don't see the risk of providing information like that to a public site as being good stewards of the systems they administer.

Today, I just switched to Bodhi Linux 2, 64 bit. This is the first 64 bit distro I had. Slackware is a good stable distro for the most part and I respect its security, longevity and leadership of Patrick Volkerding. But, I had a problem with the Centurylink connection randomly disconnecting. This is a problem with Centurylink on Linux not specifically with Slackware. The only way I found to get the connection back was to reboot. I just wanted to go to a distro with a faster boot and the use of the large Ubuntu repository. Indeed Bodhi 2, 64 bit has the fastest boot I have ever seen on a desktop operating system.

Over the last 12 months Slackware has gone from 16 to 9 in the distrowatch page hit ranking. Im thinking slack is the new ubuntu.

It is just sooo different that it attracts attention

Slackware is different??? I do not think so. I think this is what every other distro should be.
In my list of different (read weirdness) there is RHEL and the likes of rpm distros, there is then pclinuxos (seeing apt there blew me away - it is a rpm based distro) what is going on? Debian makes sense (sometimes it is a revelation) but then *untu with their wa of doing things is different.

My 2 cents.

And for me rpm/yum makes more sense than deb based systems. Each to his own.

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I'm back with Slackware 14.0 this time at 64 bit. Slackware now at 17.15%, 2nd place at LiCo. Continuing to climb on the DistroWatch 6 month.

Once you slack it's hard to go back! lol

I got stuck into Slackware again recently (last time it was 3.x over dialup and Kernel 2.0.y).

I wanted to compile a specific application (PEMU, a Cisco PIX Firewall emulator) that needed GCC 3.4. I looked and there it was in Slackware 11.0 I've also gone more recent and installed a copy of 13.37, all of these in Virtual Boxes.

Slackware's like fine wine. Once you take a sip.... it's like a bear to honey.

The person who introduced me to Linux was a Slackware user but I was always put off because people implied that you needed to be an expert to use it. Now I can't see really enjoying using anything else.