Why is Slackware ignored by the press?
 

I was just reading all the hoopla on the release of KDE 4.0 and don't recall seeing Slackware mentioned even once, yet Slackware uses KDE as its default desktop.
That seems to be the case in almost every news story I read about Linux. Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu, and one or two others, are often mentioned, but rarely, if ever, does Slackware get a nod.
Why is that?

Slackware isn't really designed for Joe average computer user and as such will not generate the buzz of the pretty distros. Our favourite distro is rock-solid, secure, and I love it. Slackers are a class apart........we rock.:cool:

Because most users forget about Slackware. Possibly because Slackware does not have a commercial end, possibly because Slackware is older then the other existing distros, possibly because people are too used to RPM and dpkg and think tgz is only source packages.

Personally, I love Slackware for simplicity. At college the gameserver is a Slackware box.

Because the press just see windows alternatives in linux. Like the Ubuntu "Next-Next-Finish" Nobrainrequired approach...

Also there is no money in slackware, as it has been stated earlier.

I'm (sometimes) the press and I mention Slackware as often as possible. ;)

The assumption is simply that "the reader" wants to read about the business-affine distributions like RH and Suse (if the article targets "executives") or about the ones which are coined as "desktop enduser's" distributions - like the Ubuntu family. I usally write my articles in distribution and package manager independent style, but some of my editors correct this into "make rpm --blahblahblah", for example.

And: "progress" is measured in terms of "graphical installation" and pre-configuration and things like that - not in terms of stability or simplicity.

Recently, all my "vims" in an article had been changed into "kates" and "gedits"...

Nevertheless - all editors I know are absolutely aware of the existence of Slackware and they all have an eye on it, but it's simply not the mainstream of Linux.

I'm really not sure wether this is a bad thing or just keeps the community nice and small. Public recognition isn't the same as a vivid and well-informed community.

I mean - the same goes for Perl - look at articles or comparision lists of programming languages - it doesn't matter that Perl still is extremely flexible, exceptionally well documented, easy to learn, has a very nice community, the books are funny and well-written, it's very embracing towards non-geeks and non-computer scientists - it's not fashionable any longer ever since PHP took over the web part and Python is considered to be "cleaner" and Ruby rolls on Rails. That CPAN is still a very outstanding and easy to use module repository - that all doesn't matter any longer in the public perception.

Suck it up folks -the rest of the world can exist quite happily without slack.
Fact of life.

The only reason I ever tried slack initially was to see what it had to offer prior to having a go at slack on 390 (mainframe). Didn't do anything for me I couldn't do somewhere else.
You'll all no doubt be happy to learn I just pulled the first two slack 12 CD isos to have another look and see if it appeals any more than in the past.
Swings and roundabouts ...

Ah why be a show off.

The reason slackware has existed in the way it has been for so long because its not a commercial sort of / marketed distribution, therefore has moved along at its own leisurely pace.

Like the grand old men of where ever said, slow and steady wins the race.

Nah man Slack to me is like LFS that is already in binary form, it was my third and best distro until I went with LFS (And no I don't care about compile times or package management, these are for the user to over come..)

I'd say if anything automagical isn't needed beyond the "you seem to have plugged in a USB stick - what sould we do now?" message of KDE, and you're not keen to see those "you've got 253943 new updates available; wanna try to push your luck, ay?" messages, Slackware simply works. But if you'd rather like your system to be more "user-friendly" (as in: you plug a piece of hardware in that doesn't have Linux drivers, and it works in a minute), then you're going to have to do some work with Slackware. That's why the press isn't interested in it: nowadays the "best" operating systems tend to think for the user in addition to all the other things, and if some operating system doesn't do that, it's not worth mentioning (in their opinion).

It's a sort of "why press likes Java but not C++" thing if you ask me.

Where did you get your data? And what are you comparing it to?

I was over at Google trends and checked out slackware against various things (Mandriva, Windows ME, Xandros) and it's certainly not negligible.

Considering Xandros has teamed up with mighty Marketing Machine Microsoft, and has commercial installations like Asus eee, it still figures lower than Slackware on google trends.

I know it's hard to get numbers on this stuff, but behind it all, the more or less undisputed title of oldest linux distro, already gets Slackware a fair bit of coverage. I saw a recent Gartner report on linux distros and there were only some 7 mentioned, and Slackware was one of them. I rather feel that there is a concerted effort to maintain a low profile.

Another question of course is whether a press profile is a desireable thing.

Some time back I bought a slackware polo from the slack store. I haven't worn it, because when I tried it on, and looked at myself in the mirror, it seemed to say "Towering Genius", which unfortunately I'm not ... maybe when I'm 70 ...

It's because the press is demented and full of propaganda ... hahahahah.

I think Slack does get its fair of press coverage when Pat releases a new version or when there is some news that impacts the distro (e.g. when Pat was ill). There probably isn't a lot of news about Slack because they don't follow a typical development model, so usually you don't get news about betas and release candidates. The devs seem to stay clear of the media limelight unlike the Canonical media machine that seems to release news about Ubuntu everyday.

I think most people in the press assume that most home users are going to want something Windows-like in order to make a smooth transition. They look at the dsitros with lots of automation, handholding and little-to-no need for the commandline. Slackware doesn't exactly qualify as Windows-like. It originally aimed to be the most UNIX-like Linux distro.

H_TeXMeX_H, I couldn't agree more! At least in my corner of the world. I'm almost certain that the local newspapers and television stations are biased. The authors of the tech articles in my newspaper are so obviously in favor of Windows. One in particular said Ubuntu Feisty was easy to install and use but difficult to learn the program names and difficult to install hardware, so he wouldn't recommend it.

When I think of things like this I always end up with the idea that maybe it's a good thing to not be in the media. Why should it advertise? Why should Pat do interviews for every tech magazine? Why should Slackware need media attention to attract more users? I think that in the long run it could do more damage than good. All it would take is a misquote of something Pat says, or stating (whether true or not) that Slackware is lacking some key features that distro X comes with. These days eye candy is considered a *key* feature.

Why is Ubuntu so popular? The media. Is it as great as the media says? Pat has been providing us with Slackware since 1993, but we, the Slackware users, not the media, are the ones that ensure it's survival and make it great.

To my knowledge, Slackware is used in business and is a business itself. Pat seems to make his living off it.

Why is it not so often in the press, then?
Because it just works. Go into a bookshop and see what the most IT related titles are about: MS Windows, MS Office, SAP R/3, and so on...

Why? Because of two reasons:
1. They have many users.
2. These products cause non-trivial problems that an average user cannot solve. The users need guidelines even for the most basic tasks they want to do with them.

What should be written about something that just does its job reliably? Slackware just works. Not many problems one could write books about... ;-)

gargamel

I would partially disagree with gargamel. There are many books about ms office just because almost any pc user uses some sort of the office, so they need to learn office somehow. IMO, > 50% of pc users do not know what driver is or how the mail works (at least, where I work). Talking about apache server problems with a friend seemed like mystics for them.

Because the so called Linux community has long associated Linux with those crappy and buggy monsters like Fedora, Ubuntu, Mandriva, etc.

So the trend is: ah, Linux, the cheap alternative to windows 98, eh?

And the rest of the press: yeah, cool!

99% of my fellow LUG attendants are ready to swear that Slackware had no user interface, whatever that means. I have met a relevant Debian developer saying this: "How can you use a distro that has no user interface in 2008?"

What a bunch of idiots!

You obviously are not a fan but no way is Red Hat or Fedora "crappy and buggy". I don't care for Ubuntu but I find Fedora offers a quality OS. To each his own.

I don't run Ubuntu, but, I do run Debian. Ubuntu is based on Debian and has apt-get, a very reliable package-management system. Slackware is my favourite distro, but, other distros have interesting, good features.
Each to his own:-)

I know what you mean! :D Where I work, in a college computer lab, IT recently upgraded our MS Office from 2003 to 2007 (whether we wanted it or not) because a lot of students had 2007 at home and were trying to open .docx files. I don't know how many different ways I tried to explain that '07 uses a new default format for saving documents that's not compatible with older versions of Office. Oh, and then there's the explanation of how to use Save as... to solve the problem. Half the time I might as well have been talking to a department store mannequin. These same people are the ones that say "I'm using Windows 20007 at home." Or when you ask them what version of IE they use, it's "I dunno."

Do you think people like that, if they saw the name Slackware, or any other Linux distro, in a headline, would know or care enough to read the article? The press knows this so they don't bother wasting resources. I have had a few ask me what Ubuntu is because they heard about it from a friend. When I say it's a Linux distribution the conversation goes like this: "Whoa! What's that?"..."An alternative to Windows."..."So, do I use it in Windows?"..."Um, no, you use it *instead* of Windows. You download and burn the CD, boot from your new disc, and it runs entirely from the CD without affecting your Windows files."..."That sounds too complicated. I'll keep Windows."

Businesses are different. If someone in IT is fortunate enough to make decisions they might choose Slackware. Managers, who most often make the decisions, tend to be attracted to buzzwords like enterprise and license and support. And they tend to suffer from tunnel vision so they only see RHEL or SLES. Especially SLES now that the buzzword Microsoft appears. And they tend to have problems with ear wax accumulation so they don't hear when someone offers other possibilities. If they saw something with the name Slackware in the headline they won't care enough to read it. The press knows this so they don't bother wasting resources.

This is very true. Having an "Easy button" where you can always call on some IT hotline is appealing to businesses whether they would really need it or not. Sadly, I've found that I sometimes knew more about the Commercial product than the people on the IT help hotline. Perhaps people just like having a place to put the blame if something breaks and if you install Slackware at your business you blame the IT person who suggested that instead of the fallible company who you're waiting on for support.

All in all, I'm fine with Slackware not being one of the "mainstream distros" because our community does fine without the press. I think trying to be mainstream would go against the beliefs of Pat and Slackware.

But, Slackware is one of the mainstream distros (at least according to distrowatch):
http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major

And I think they do give a pretty fair review of it there.

I think of "mainstream distros" as the top 4 in that list: Ubuntu, Red Hat/Fedora, Debian, Suse. It is for these distros that generally get the most software support from software developers.

I thought the review was OK. It said a lot of good things and caught the heart of the Slackeare philosophy. However, it leaves the reader with the impression that Slackware is not a complete distro in itself but rather a small unuseful core. It talks about the conservative selection of software but fails to mention that it contains most of the libraries you would ever need right out of the box. Perhaps the review has not been updated for Slackware 12, because I certainly think that it is a good distro for desktops and does not require that "much manual post-installation work before it can be tuned into a modern desktop system."

You are, of course, right, that this is yet another valid reason for the large number of available books about Windows.

What always surprises me: People, who are totally horrified if they even hear the word "command line" buy tons of books in order to learn really scary things like Windows batch and VBA programming...
I'll never get that...

gargamel

popularity?
 

Check out distrowatch, have a look at the distros above Slackware in popularity ... now do you see?

---

I've been using Slackware for about 8 years and have just switched to Ubuntu7.10 (64). I've even trialled gnome for a week ... it's not gone too well though: loved the eye candy (via compiz) and great for doing simple things, neat layout etc.. Found it impossible to get anything complex done though OOo wouldn't work, no tabs in nautilus, can't create links even, kwallet alternative was a complete mystery. Automated network widget kept screwing with my default route.

Even Dolphin is better than Nautilus, and that's saying something.

Ooo, rant over.