I would put it differently:

LFS = Custom build vehicle, high degree of "personalization"
Gentoo = F1 race car, pure hightech, VERY fast, but needs intense care
Red Hat = VW Golf
Debian = VW Touran (Minivan)
Ubuntu = VW Golf GTI station wagon
SuSE = SUV, flexible, suitable for occasional off-road trips, easy to drive on the road
Slackware = Hovercraft: All-terrain vehicle, huge pay-load, most flexible, but steering requires a bit of practicing...
OpenBSD = Dreadnaught
Solaris = ISS, ie pure hightech, but not a very comfortable place to be
MS Windows = Titanic
Tux = the penguin that lives on the iceberg that the Titanic decided to mess with...



gargamel

EDIT 2007-01-08 22:33 MET: Added a few "explanations"

I say:

Gentoo = top fuel dragster with a little too much nitromethane in the fuel mix. I think you may have seen a few of these on TV, the ones where the engine explodes part way through the race.

MS Vista = Bunch of Shattered Glass

...but they are not Microsofting the distributions for the reasons the luddites are claiming they are.

Correction: I'm "a" maintainer of that. While I've done huge piles of work with it lately, I am not the sole maintainer and there are other people involved who without, I would quickly burn out and simply switch to using Ubuntu for my desktops.

The basic problem here is that change and particularly progress are being viewed by a portion of this userbase as inherently evil. Thinking like that is just a fast track to becoming as obsolete and irrelevant as BSD. If something makes life easier for 80% of the users, while making things (proportionally*) more complex for the remaining 20%, it should likely be included rather than making 100% of the users have to do more work that otherwise wouldn't be needed. To this end, we're to the point now where X should at least be given a shot at configuring itself correctly, because that doesn't preclude the user from going and redoing it themselves if they want--but that sort of thing almost instantly starts people complaining because it might fail for them and it appears that they feel that if X automatically configures itself, that their knowledge is now somehow less useful or something.

If you want a really painful example, you've seen how many people bitched and moaned about HAL and dbus being included, but for pete's sake these things are being incorporated right into the kernel to put an end to a whole slew of tasks that are generally pointless for users to deal with since modern hardware takes the guesswork out of identification and operation tasks.


* - as in not disproportional. If some people still have to manually configure things, they're no better off than before, but they don't get the benefit that the other 80% do. I am not talking about the case as with RedHat for an example where you not only have to know what you're doing, but how to use the GUI tool for it as well because the configuration files that hold the "real" data are not only user-unfriendly but designed for users never to touch directly.


...oh and you actually can create something from Ubuntu, which is why there's literally a million crackheaded spinoffs of it now. It's still Debian underneath, it's just even less documented.

Honestly, I think your points are valid, evilDagmar, but I'm not sure Slackware users are really that much against novelty and easier stuff when they're proven robust and unfailing. After all, modules autoloading is now commonly used and it's quite more pleasant than when you had to figure out by yourself which ones to load.
Just as you are, I would indeed appreciate that X does load with Vesa or autodetects correctly the device and then allows you to change the driver on the fly. I'm sure it'll come in time and I think everybody will be pleased.
But I appreciate the possibility to set up manually a configuration easily when automatic things fail. Just as I appreciate that my manual settings are not reset everytime I use the graphical configuration tool (just as Yast used to do).
After all, Slackware users use it also because it provides a properly preconfigured system. HAL and udev have been added once they seemed robust and stable.

If you target the whole Linux population, yes. But Slackware targets only a subset of that population (probably that 20%). It's not possible to make a system that makes everyone happy, that why it is great that there are "very userfriendly, but can get in the way" distributions like Ubuntu and "not so userfriendly, does not get in the way" distributions like Slackware Linux.

Each to his/her own. Of course, a lot more people would grok UNIX if they ran Slackware Linux or some BSD .

Million of Ubuntu versions with default Desktop Environment replaced. They even share the same repos, so they are not so different.

How can you be so sure that config files will be stored in human readable form?

That is what I was trying to say. Sorry it didn't come out clearly.

I think it would be nice for some other common command line programs to be featured in the SlackBook. One that comes to mind is midnight commander.

I never made this claim. Not even once.

We're luddites now Arr, dadnabbit Seth! let all God-Fearing Yeomen band together and burn down that Accursed Cotton Mill! If we don't take action soon, why even Slackware will be using that Tool of The Devil, autoconfiguration!

EDIT: I'm not opposed to things that make your work easier, but the image of a horde of enraged Slackers storming a cotton mill was too good to pass up

Return compatibility with Linux 2.4.xx kernels.

Installer with better options to newbies choose a full or small system to desktop, server etc. A kind of "modular" Slack.

A separate directory to old command line softs, no to all command line. Or to place these old softs to pasture.

Better description of packages on installer and slack.desc.

Not possible without patching glibc.

That's already been addressed in this thread and elsewhere.

What?? That didn't make sense.

I think we need live in geeks with the IQ of 180 and teach newbies.Not! But other wise slack install is ten times easier then Ubunto it must be I spend every other day fixing peoples Ubuntu auto install mistakes. as long as slack keeps the self dependency to the user but gives a dependency read out like puppy I think that would be grand.