Most or all of you questions have been answered, but I would like to chime in.

They use slackware because it is stable. If one were a hipster they might even refer to it as "mad stable yo".

They have much more to fear from the windows computers being connected to the internet than the slackware boxes. Slackware is also "mad secure yo".

Welcome to slackware. It is very good for studiers of math. As you can see, I use it for the most important algorithms there are, poker.

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As to the question of why window$, linux, mac etc computers can all share information on the same network when they are all different, well that is how the internet was designed.

The idea of the internet is to allow computers to exchange data over a robust network. However, nobody knows what type of computer will be connected to the network. So a number of "protocols" were developed (FTP, HTTP, etc) which guaranteed that as long as the computer understood the protocol, the data transfer would be successful.

When a computer connects to a website, it doesn't download a "web page". It downloads a file written in HTML. A HTML file is just a set of instructions that tells the receiving computer what to display. It is up to the receiving computer to decide how to display the page. A sophisticated browser like Firefox will faithfully execute all of the HTML "tags" while a more basic browser like "lynx" will say something like, "******* these tables/frames/etc. I will just display everything as text".

Now it is easy to see why so many servers run linux while the majority of PCs run window$. The superior stability of linux makes it a must for a server while the PCs connected to it are unaware what the operating system is.

I'm not a mathmetician, but I have come to like and appreciate both linux and slackware. My first experience with linux was Puppy linix, which I still use as it's a very handy little distro to have around for anyone in IT. Since then I've tried all of the major distros out there, or some version of them, and all of the major desk top environments too. I was what you would call a distro hopper and install a new distro at least once a week... which was hard on my hard drive... until I successfully installed slackware.. now I think my distro hopping days are over!

Harrod,

The answer to these two questions is dependability.
I have been running Slackware since 1995 and have never changed. The reason is stability, plus it's what I cut my teeth on. I went directly from DOS to Slackware, I tried windows but it couldn't compete. Windows is strictly an operating system for doing daily tasks such as office work, text editing, surfing the net, email and such. It isn't built for hard number crunching and bare bones system computing like unix/Slackware is.

I just upgraded my Slackware system today from version 13 to version 13.37, not because I needed to but because I was just curious. I still have a music server running on a very old version of Slackware that serves music to me and my friends, it has been running for over two years without a reboot or a crash. The only way I know it's still there and running is I open my web browser and click on my web page and listen to music. That's why people swear by Slackware, you can install it and forget about it.

I have looked at other versions of Linux such as Suse, Debian, Ubuntu and others but after reading reviews on them and seriously checking into the what experts write on them I always stay with Slackware. I know it's guts inside and out. I'm a CLI (command line interface)loving kind of guy.

And "Who is Patrick?" He's the guy we all love and depend on to give us the best operating system on the planet. Hell of a guy, eh? We think so!

Have a good one Harrod.