Exactly. Who can explain what it is about Slack that (for a lot of people, perhaps not all) once you've tried it it draws you back if you stray? I've enjoyed messing with other distros, and there are a few I haven't tried yet, but Slack's made more of an impression on me than any other.

im not sure what it was that made me stick with slack, i had tried a lot of other distros: rh, fedora, gentoo, mandrake, deb, freebsd, list goes on... Slack just had the level of configuration i wanted openly available. I personaly find changing config files much easier to do than going than crawling through 8 tabs in some gui looking for a setting.

slack is like that beat-up junky easy-chair that your girlfriend wants you to get rid of but you cant because its SOOOO comfy :-D Sure it doesnt look as pretty, but it does what i want and has nothing i dont need.

well, except a cup holder. :-P

Well, I was simply tired of the more and more diverging "styles" of distributions. If I got things right on Suse, I couldn't apply the same stuff on Red Hat. If I made a deb packages, I couldn't use it because there was just RPM. Init styles, configuration files, than this stupid time of "no, we just have Gnome" and "no, we only support KDE" - I was simply fed up with all this. Or distributor's additions and changes on sourcecode level where afterwards just the distributor's packages would even work.

Than the HOURS I spent to unclutter systems instead of adding stuff and at last my experiences with the maintainer's or distributor's idea of location, layout and configuration gave me the rest, after I stumpled upon something I had to bring up FAST and absolutely NOTHING of the project's README and very helpful guide would fit anymore, because the package was thoroughly "pre-configured". I had to throw it all away, compile and configure on my own. So - why exactly did I need a fancy distribution?

Back to Slackware was plain and simple out of exhaustion.

For the same reasons, I went back to fvwm and kicked Gnome and KDE. I'm so tired of things like that. Instead of investing all the energy into ONE really COOL desktop search application - no, we have to have two for Gnome and another one based on Qt..

So, basically I'm back there where I was in 1993/94.

I could have sworn there were several other posts exactly like this. Or am I having dejavu ?

its a popular reason i guess

Why did I choose Slackware and stick with it?

it was the only major distro that I was able to install on my P120 Classic laptop with only 40MB RAM (it's no longer possible, or at least not so easy, with Slack 12, but the laptop has been replaced in the meantime, so it's no longer a problem)

it is well maintained: it's always consistent and reliable right out of the box. It's released only when the quality is assured, not when it is scheduled by management.

it is conservative in the best sense: Upgrades are smooth over years, and there's some level of consistency and quality you just can rely on. Eg, I really like openSuSE, because it is usually easy to administer and use, too. But it is innovative: A change in the package management system buried deep in the system caused a lot of problems that made me skip openSuSE 10.1. You never need to skip a Slackware release, because when there is a need for such fundamental changes, the distro is released only when they are well integrated and mature. Eg, the indroduction of HAL and D-BUS meant a significant change, but instead of pushing them just out according to some commercially motivated project schedule, Slackware 12.0 was released when they were working smoothly.

it is pure and clean: distro specific patches are avoided as much as possible, which is a big advantage if you compile stuff from sources

it is designed to satisfy users, not philosophers, who don't include useful tools in their distribution just because the license is not completely "free" (although it has no limitations relevant for users)

the community is very helpful, pragmatic and down-to-earth, as opposed to philosophic and fanatic

But most important: Somehow I just like it!

gargamel

Yeah, I just finished replying to something exactly like this. Anyway, Slackware gives us more control in a slim, yet full-featured, distro.

I'll tell you one, and that's two things: stability, speed, reliability )

I started playing with linux at the end of 2005. As a totally n00b,I've posted the question: "which distro to use" over a dozens of forums. And every answer was different..RH,Mandriva,Suse.. ("for beginners"). But, one answer helped me to decide: "If you use RH,Mandriva,Suse, etc. you'll learn RH,Mandriva,Suse.. If you use Slackware, you'll learn Linux"
For the last 2 years, I've tried few more distros,but I've always come back to Slack..
Like someone said: Other distros are here to try, Slackware is here to love ))

Because it's Slackware.
Once you try it you can't get rid of it.

Once you tried Slack, you don't go back .. or at least not for long.

I've tried a shed load of distro's over the years, some I have liked over others, some lasted no more than an hour on my system.

One of my pet frustration on other distro's has always been the RPM based package managers. I am still amazed that the rpm package managers are touted as the easier, more user friendly option for installing / upgrading your software packages. How many people here have used such distro's, tried to use the PM to install / upgrade a package only to be confronted with a million dependency alerts that informs you everything but the kitchen sink needs upgraded before the package can be installed successfully? Don't get me wrong, this didn't happen every time, but more than enough to make me return to Slack with a sigh of relief.

There are other prodomenant reasons why I have a fondness for Slackware, almost everything said previous in this thread relates to the reasons why.

Fast and stable. The only two reasons I need.

Well the first time I used slackware, which was 9.1 I believe, the reason I chose it was it was the only distro that would recognize my sata controller.

So slackware was all I could use at that time.

Simple for me:

The philosophy defined exactly what I was looking for when I escaped the bonds of Windows servers and DOS batch files.

I simply like to decide on my own wether GUI application XY actually has to need a screensaver or not.

Same here, but I have never tried Slackware proper... Instead I tried Bluewhite64, which installed without a hitch and has been running likewise ever since.

Being rather new to linux, I have a lot to learn and there's probably a lot more that I'll never learn, but the Slackware-based BW64 seems rock solid, so why should I change now? I might even learn to compile a package one day...