Hi,

Someone mentioned the 'Slackbook earlier'. I will suggest that you can look at the SlackBook_Beta

BTW, Slackware is stable and you can learn to use it or use a fork like Salix which will do a lot of the work for you.

Hope this helps.

Traditionally installers were considered important, because that is was distro hoppers usually do: They install Linux and then move on the to next distro, they won't see anything else. A big part of the "Linux desktop" scene consists of people installing and upgrading packages all the time, fiddling around with compiler flags, customizing settings and "optimizing" stuff (like boot times) just for the sake of it. They're never going to use a Linux installation for real productivity tasks.

Slackware is just a compilation of stable software on a DVD, set up once and then good for years of actual use. There is almost no branding. There are no fancy tools, that get in your way. And it works independent from the Internet (that's a big plus). You won't notice these strengths, if you are just clicking through the installer and make a screenshot of the default desktop.

for first, i think, we must define, who is "user", and who is "idiot", because, in my opinion, these around a world is two sort of system - designed for users, and designed for idiots. good examples may be a slackware for first and MS windows systems for seconds.
difference between these user categories is - "user" is intelligent, he knows how to read text documents, he want to learn, and grow. the second, "idiot" is a another spicy - they want to "simple all must work", it want to another peoples choice for him, and only think, who he want to do in case of problems - call tech support, and tell hem an error code. for that reason, slackware not "idiot friendly", and i hope, he never get that. there be a linux distro, who go in that way, difficult to say - it is a good for her, or not, because from one hand - idiots is a lot, lot more than "users", and microsoft is a very rich company not for make a product for 5 percent of peoples, who use computers, sure...
btw, one of good sign, who i see, is password checker on make a new password procedure. on slackware, if you enter a weak password - firstly system warn you. but you can enter the same password again twice, and system takes it. user can choice.
in a redhat ( for example), you cannot enter simple password. "system for idiots" be sure, user is an idiot, and do not allow him to do what he want...like a microsoft popup window with only one choice - "ok"

I don't think that Slackware needs this sort of elitism.

2 members found this post helpful.

actually, most things in world need some sort of elitism.
playing a chess, reading a books, interesting about "what world is building and things work", physics, and so on.
on other hand - there is beer, whiskey, TV, politics and news, and football \ hockey \ basketball \ regby \ soap operas for rest of human populity. i think, surgeon's law is less or more correct - about a 95% of all is garbage. without exceptions on peoples too

and the more thing is popular, the worse it is. i'd say, last very good slackware was 12.2, yet it in nowadays anyway is good - but not as good, as in past. it is not slackware creators problem, it is anywhere - kernel , KDE, and another software gets larger, have more errors and problems, work slower... a times ago we have very good games, demoscene - good graphic and astonishing music pack on kilobytes and megabytes, and works fast on ancient machines. now we have worse result packed in gigabytes, and need clustered supercomputer to run that...:\

That has nothing to do with popularity and people you call "idiots". Some of the upstream software quality gets worse, because it is actually not in wide use anymore. Projects splitting up further doesn't help either. Some of the more exotic desktop environments have more developers than actual users, so they mainly program for themselves. And I won't test desktop of the week, because I have something better to do.

To get stable software, you not only need a damn good release engineering process, you also need lots of users testing it, that includes the simple-minded people you dismiss, because they can also trigger and report bugs. There is a reason why the Linux kernel itself is of such a high quality: It has magnitudes more exposure than let's say Cinnamon or MATE.

Taurine excreta.
P.S.
Bullis izkarnijumi.
(Thanks, Google Translate)

I always draw a very strict line between system use and system administration. My users are always supposed to merely use the system, and some of them don't even know that this thing they're working on is called Linux, let alone Slackware. My car mechanic doesn't call me an "idiot" only because I'm only supposed to drive my old Mercedes, without being able to repair it or even do some simple maintenance.

Let me see if I get this right. If we take any post on any electronic message board, by any user, then 95% of that post is garbage. I can live with that...

Let's see, in my Steam library I have:
- BIT.TRIP RUNNER
- Doorways
- Dungeons of Dredmor
- Game Dev Tycon
- The Journey Down: Chapter One
- Rogue Legacy
- Shadowrun Returns
- Sparkle 2 Evo
- Teslagrad

All of them fit your first definition and there are many many more alone on Steam. That you don't know them does not mean that they don't exist.

1 members found this post helpful.

While you'd be better off in the long run just learning Slackware, there's also Salix, for the "lazy Slacker":

http://salixos.org/

1. The demoscene is still very much active

2. If you want games written for technically constrained systems, then buy a 3DS. Or pretty much any machine that Nintendo ever released, for that matter.