This all may change with Slackware 13. Currently I am on current. X is a major upgrade and just works for me. I also stopped recompiling font related packages some time ago since the default rendering became really good (to my taste and monitor).

I really care about only few programs and Slackware allows to have the latest with reasonable effort. The rest should just not be too old to make me happy. Few weeks ago I decided to use an idling free partition to check if some other distro is better. So, I visited Distrowatch and was shocked. Every major distro had something fundamental so outdated that it made no sense to even look at other features, even Ubuntu. I found exactly one candidate for distro hopping - Arch Linux.

Arch installed and worked well, but the package management failed to track some dependencies (most amazingly Firefox did not start without manual installation of a minor package, I do not remember what it was) and pacman itself was not very stable. Finally I concluded that if something happens to Slackware then I can switch to Arch and extended the Slackware partition.

Why Slackware? I guess because there are no show stoppers and the set of features is consistent so that there are many people who like it.

I want to be DHA. BUT after slack I don't know where to hop.

ha ha ha ha

Amen! I am keeping my fingers crossed. Because, my ATI Radeon Xpress 1100 appears to be outdated.

I've been using Linux distros for ten years. I began using Slackware and FreeBSD in '02 and stayed with them until Ubuntu came on the scene.

In the last year I've test-driven Debian Lenny, openSUSE, Fedora, Mandriva, Mint and PCLOS. Not one stayed on my hd for more than two days. I remained unsatisfied. It was more than gui deep somehow.

Finally I moved back to FreeBSD when 7.0 was released. Two weeks ago I decided to revisit Slackware with 12.2 on my backup hard drive. My laptop -- a three-year-old inexpensive Acer Aspire 3620 -- works beautifully.

Slackware is comfortable...I like knowing that automatic updates aren't thrown at me all of the time, and that the power to change anything about the system resides with me and no one else.

After four years of Ubuntu, I appreciate Slackware even more than the first time. There's something about coming back to a system you learned so much from, and that it's still so familiar after having been away so long, that you can't help but feel at home again.

As I said: A Slackware partition and an experiment partition.

I always keep three root partitions on my test machine, sharing other partitions for data, /boot (with all the different kernels), and /home (when possible).

Currently, I have:
1) slackware64-current
2) slackware(32)-stable
3) free for testing any distribution or new kernel versions with Slackware

1) & 2) share /home without too many problems (but I do not use KDE...)

I do install other Linux flavors once in a while, but mainly in VMs, to test scripts, software, etc.

I really do believe I've lost all interest in distrohopping. I am now a confirmed monodistroist.

I am now a monodistroist as well. The only other distro that I like, FreeBSD, has been removed in favour of Slackware-current.
It is good to be a Slacker.

I'm the same. I run lots of other distros in VirtualBox (and some BSD's/Solaris/XP) for a change now and then but nothing comes close to Slackware for me. Sometimes I think I just like installing things ! Keeping all versions patched and up to date is a real pain though! I still multiboot on occasion to go between 64 and 32 bit versions of Slackware but I am forever short on disk space. 500GB soon goes once you're used to it !

I know... 1.2TB on my test box and always needing more...
But I also have a lot of VMs with older Slackware versions, other distros, Solaris, FreeBSD, and even one or other Windows version.

i had a dual boot Slack 12.2 and win2k, and used it dual boot (actually started as a dual boot with slack 10 and win2k) for quite a while. then i got a newer machine, and put my disks in it. win2k wouldn't boot anymore, so i tried to do a reinstall. neither win2k or XP (after i tried about 10 times to reinstall win2k) would install. win2k didn't like the disk controller, and made one of the win partitions disappear (permanently). XP refuses to install if it is sharing a disk with another OS. i got errors saying "unknown partition type exists on disk, do you want to (D)elete the partition or (Q)uit the installation?".... or something to that effect.....even with a 35 gig partition (the first one on the disk, no less) set aside for windows, so with that (and the fact that windows' heavy handed disk tools made 10 gigs or so of data irreparably evaporate) i decided that i have a working linux system, and i'll stay with that. so i no longer use win-anything. anything i really need that is windows software seems to run just fine with wine.......

I have the same card. The latest proprietary driver from ATI wouldn't build on Slackware 12.2 and the open source driver was causing major hassle when waking the computer up from suspend.

After many trials, I finally found out that older version 8.2 of the ATI proprietary driver (fglrx) builds and works flawlessly.

I started with Ubuntu, like so many others. Soon, being the geek that insists on tweaking everything (including that which doesn't need to be tweaked!), I went with slackware. Well, turns out it's addicting. Just recently, I found out that constant rebooting (sharing the family computer) will kill a hard drive (oops!). Ah well, it was only an 80 gig. Just today the 250 gig got here from newegg and it went in with xp on top of it. So now my main computer (I pretty much refuse to use xp as my main OS.) is this old machine from 98: a blazing fast 350 mhz processor, 185.71 mb of ram, and a whopping 10 gig hard drive! I found another reason to use slackware (I actually already had a working install before the hd on the dell crashed, fortunately): It runs on that which doesn't run anything else!

Ok! I'll try it on my system.