I think a lot of the negative comments about Slackware are based on two things completely unrelated to actually using the OS:

1. Not offering to partition the target drive automatically.

2. Not offering automatic dependency resolution.

I am not arguing that these things should change--if you can't get Slackware installed, it's likely not the distro for you. But I do think they help put the comments on the "pain" of installing Slackware in some kind of perspective.

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One thing I see very commonly on these boards is desire and contemplation, by some, on how to make Slackware "mainstream." I think it is a fallacy to seek this out. Slackware requires its users to think and learn. It's part of Slackware's identity (IMO). Nothing in this universe is going to make people start "reading and learning" all of a sudden. There will always be people looking "to take the easy street" and get burned installing those one-click distros. Slackware is the road less traveled and zen path to linux utopia -- but only those willing to take that path will ever understand what linux utopia is. It's our duty to reveal that path to those that are looking for it. My 2 cents.

Slackware needs very little documentation because of its design philosophy. Its design philosophy is to make only essential changes (security and bugfix) to its components, the same components that other distros enhance -- Linux kernel, GNU utilities etc.

So the standard documentation on the standard components is what is needed for Slackware.

When I first started with Slackware, I began a document "Slackware Systems Administration Notes". After a while I realised that most of it was about Linux, not Slackware, so moved most of the content into "Linux Systems Administration Notes". The Slackware document is small compared with the Linux document.

I agree. And speaking of installation reviews, they are almost always done badly. It is important to describe the installation tools, but when they do it from the point of view of the end user, they completely miss the point. The end user couldn't install any Linux distro, or Windoze, or any OS designed for commodity hardware (barring blind luck). This is in part because any hardware issue, no matter how tiny, results in an instant fail. GUI tools, in particular, are pointless to even mention. A good installation review could as well assume solid familiarity with OS maintenance and concentrate on things that really matter, like automation, installation media options, and configuration/customization options, to name a few.

When we look at it this way, Slackware installation tools are simply superb.

P.S. What is the Pun? I don't get it.

Agreed; it is difficult to find honest reviews speaking about design, quality, robustness, etc. How can you review a product which you have installed in a virtual machine and used for half a day?
[OT]And it is funny to see distributions get high notes although "there are still some problems" (= it crashes randomly) but "this new technology looks very promising" (= it is not ready) and "I look forward to the next release" (=this one is really unusable).[/OT]

As someone just starting to play with Slackware in Virtualbox I have to say that the general attitude of Slackware users and the reputation Slackware has as a "pure" distro is something which attracts me.
I can't say I'll ever give up Debian and go Slack, but if I can work out how to get my hardware working it is likely I will.
My first impressions are:
The install is (on Virtualbox at least) straightforward and accommodating. I always set up my partition manually, as I think most Linux users do after a while, and I like the package and config choices during install -- they seem a little more granular than the ones with Debian.
Once installed having to create a new user was a new one on me. Don't get me wrong, I've done it before but it's the first time in years I've done it on my own PC. Then again, the tool works great .
Selecting desktop environment and deciding whether to change runlevel was another new step, but appreciated as it gave more control for only 30 seconds of work.
Because I went for a full install I had Apache installed, which was great. What was even better was that it was disabled by default and just took a change in rc.d to run it. Same goes for SSH and a few other things. Put simply: It was good to have things installed and ready without them sitting there running in their default states.

Where Slackware may fall down is supporting my odd hardware setup and need for proprietary software, but once I get it dual booted I'll be sure to find out.

One thing is for sure -- the initial slackware install isn't any harder than any other distro.

That is somewhat similar to my start with Slackware. I was also a Debian user before (and my fileserver is still running Debian) and I really had doubts about Slackware. I have seen the Slackers here on LQ and thought: "OK,I will try it". I had some threads here about my concerns (it was really hard for me to grasp the concept of installing packages without dependency resolution) but now I know the advantages of that concept and really don't want to miss the simplicity of Slackware's package management system. After I managed to understand that I found Slackware much more convenient than Debian (while I still think that Debian can be a nice distro).

It is really like the Slackers say: Once you Slack you will never go back.

my opinion: each distribution has its own philosophy and approach to design.
isn't that why there are so many distros out there to suit different needs?

we need try to understand what slackware is trying to deliver.
to me, slackware taught a lot of things: how to be simple and modest.
and the fact that slackware is so-called 'unstructured' (it's pretty structured in the most basic level to me),
provides opportunities for the end-user to configure slackware to suit his/her own needs.

after years using slackware, i realized that the tools i need for daily use are *all* included in slackware.
i used to install plenty of unnecessary programs and libraries

so the keyword here is minimalism. slackware provides the basics, everything else is extra.
when we need that extra stuffs which are different to different people, there's slackbuilds.org,
or if we're lucky, we may find what we need at alienBOB's slackbuild repository.
if we can't find it, we build it ourself

but then again, different people have different ways of thinking and it happens that slackware's philosophy
suits my way of thinking. yet the fact is, i found slackware and i love it very much.
i think i like its approach: if slackware is something of value, people will find it.
what do you guys think?

Regarding the *dreaded installer* - it takes around 15 minutes (+/- 1 min) from 0 to full slack. I'll make a video of it for non believers if necessary.
But, in order to achieve that you need 2 things: read and understand the documentation and try to do it at least twice. Sad thing is that most of the people fail at the step one, subsection "read".

Yep, sounds about right. I did once time doing a fairly small install of 13.37 (somewhere around 1.5Gb, including a basic build/development environment, plus X and fluxbox) using tagfiles. It took me a little over 20 mins. Now granted this is longer than you despite the much smaller amount of software, however I was timing from the point of starting partitioning until I was done with the basic post install configuration (e.g. adding a user, switching to generic kernel +initrd, setting local keyboard mapping in X, configuring slackpkg mirror +fetching and installing all updates, repacking and installing Opera , and changing a few other things to be the way I like them). Also I didn't race through it as fast as I possibly could. I just saw time when I started and when I was done I happened to look at the clock again. Also during the software install phase I did other stuff, so I didn't really lose the whole 20 mins.

slackware has a great installer. simple and and easy. I've installed slack a few times, and I can't complain. I will admit that the very first time I installed slack I did get overwhelmed my frisk. I was a noob to Linux all together and had no idea what to do. I gave up that time. I didn't even give cfdisk a go, which is a shame. I used cfdisk next time and felt a lot more comfortable. I've always done expert installs since I started gnu/linux due to my first computer being a Mac and the bootloaders needing to go on the root partition; so cfdisk made partitioning a breeze, and there was my first leant thing from slackware. I learnt about a new helpful tool I wasn't aware of previously.

They focus on that, what the average distro hopper does: Installing the Linux distribution of the week, play around a bit with the default desktop environment, then return to Windows for everyday use.

Of course, in this use case the installer plays an important role. While I consider every use case as valid, I don't think, that these people deserve the effort, which is put into Slackware to make it an stable and well-running operating system. So there is no point in appealing to them.

Just make a Flash game, which simulates a sophistated GUI installer and a nice looking GNOME desktop, call it "My Uber Distro". Done. ;-)

I must say this gave me a smile, because Debian is my second favorite distro.

After playing around with the floppy based root/boot pairs that were all the rage back in the day, Slackware was the first real distro I tried (version 2, I think -- just disk sets A, AP & D -- I wanted to install L & N, but I didn't have the space, or the floppys or the time for the long downloads).

I switched to Red Hat 6 because it was supposed to be the "standard." Later I tried to set up a dual boot with Red Hat 9 and SuSE, but the SuSE installer trashed my GRUB and I lost them both.

I finally settled on Debian as the "right" way to go, but its idea of "user friendliness" (hide the details, make the decisions for me, restrict my choices: "you want to remove Gnome games, well that means you want to remove *all* of Gnome!) quickly drove me up the wall. I looked into several other distros with all of the same problems. I was stumped. What to do?

Wait, there's Slackware still around. Yes, I read where it is supposed to be the most "difficult" distribution, but I didn't remember it that way back in the early 90s.

I downloaded Slackware 10 and everything suddenly looked familiar again. THIS is what Linux is supposed to be. Oh, it looks a bit old-fashioned and even uses LILO instead of GRUB. I was home again. AND it was faster. AND it was more stable. AND it didn't hide things from me. AND it had better documentation. Debian has a book, but you have to read it to find out what you need to do to compile a C program! Where was GCC? What is a *nix machine without a C compiler?

Slackware has more fully commented scripts and source, and better man pages, and Slackbook is very helpful without being hand-holdy.

When I first got this second-hand eeepc 2G surf, I tried installing a minimal Slackware 13.37 system in the 2G flash drive. I succeded in installing a true netbook system with just the very basics, gcc, wi-fi, xfce,firefox, xpdf & xine. It worked well, but it was very tight. I never would have even tried this with any other distro. They would have just complained that my hardware was inadequate and refuse to even try.

It bugs me when they say that you get slightly out-of-date packages. Debian and others also shy away from the bleeding edge, but all you have to do is upgrade to "current" and you'll be plenty up-to-date. And Slackware's "current" is still more reliable than most of the other's "current."

The computer techs at work asked me what I was running on this little thing, and were *shocked* when I said it was Slackware. They now look at me like I'm crazy or something (they're fans of Ubuntu -- looks too much like Debian to me).

This is your opinion. There's no consensus out there that Slackware is poorly described and even so if it is too difficult for you feel free to go back to the Windows forums.