ANyone who uses Slackware will know that its great, But Why is it not at the top??
Sorry if i don't know this one ... but don't you just love to see slackware go all the way to the top??

Probably because its so "command based". hard for all them who don't like to read much

Because Slackware is not "newbie"-ized, i.e. it's not designed with all the gui stuff for system admin, nothing really done automated so new linux converts can feel at ease, etc. That's what makes slack so great, because it TEACHES one the internals of linux as it should be.

But i think thats stupid though, inorder to use a computer efficenly you need to know how the operating system works by compiling slackware.....

but still... ITS SO SMOOTH!!

Very little, if any, commercial software supports Slackware (as opposed to RedHat, and Suse), so some of us who are doing this for a living aren't going to touch it.

Second - why would you worry about your favorite distro winning a popularity contest?

Jon J.

"How come Windows is more popular than Linux... since Linux is so much better ?"

Who cares about popularity. Go by quality and what you like best/comfortable with, don't worry about the small things really.

The most popular distros focus on an "easy to use", GUI-based setup. Slackware is more command-line oriented, which requires the user to research how to use it. Which is fine for its target audience, but many people want somthing that "just works" without any tinkering.

but you can't really do much without knowing how it works
I mean look out there how many 3rd party software are there....None
So Linux isn't exactly for people who doesn't know how to code, if they don't why don't they just stick with Win XP

I don't know how to code.. and I use Linux.

There's big differences in editing config files, programming and small amount of shell scripting if necessary. But you don't have to know how to program to use Linux or *nix based OS's.

Regarding the original question: Popularity != Quality. Here in the US the magazine with the highest circulation is TV Guide; there are over 30,000 McDonald's restaurants worldwide; and the newspaper with the highest circulation is USA Today. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't consider any of those things to be the "best" in their respective category. That being said, I think it would be great if Slack were the most popular distro, but hopefully as existing Linux users experiment with different distros Slack will win some converts, and as Linux spreads in general the number of Slackers is sure to increase. -- J.W.

Slackware is pretty damn popular anyways. If you cruise around the LQ forums, you'll see a lot of the people with a significant amount of posts use Slackware. That or Gentoo. I figure it's because these 2 distro's offer the most flexibilty in terms of... Well, anything I know that's why I use Slack. A lot of newbies don't choose Slack because it's a little intimidating. At least, if you listen to all the hype about how 'hard' Slackware is to install, configure, use, etc.

I am about to give Gentoo a try on some free space though. I like the idea of compiling my whole distro, and would like to see how it performs in comparison with Slackware

Why the Slack distro isn't the most popular:

fdisk/tui installer
tgz/pkgtool
cli orientation
reputation
walnut creek?

Basically what everybody else said. Fdisk and Slackware's rep as a hard distro scare a lot of people off. And a lot of people are disappointed without a pretty install process that they should only see once or at most once a version. Rpm took over the universe first and then Debian and Gentoo's automated type installers with dependency checking and whatnot. And, just as people want fancy installers and automatic packaging, they want fancy automatic config tools and so on, and like the GUIs, whereas Slack is basically a bash-and-editor distro. You could maybe add that BSD-style inits deconvert a lot of potential converts because they're used to SysV even though BSD is *much* better. At the same time that Slack has a rep as the 'most Unix-like Linux' and they're very standards compliant, this is the very thing that makes them an atypical and fairly non-standard Linux. Everybody else has the common factor of no common factors.

But the very things that may turn off some people are some of the very things Slackers love about Slack. I wouldn't mind if Slack was the most popular distro out there (as it was for quite some time) but I don't really care as long as Patrick Volkerding and the rest continue to produce it. If *they* cared about popularity and Slack's relative lack of popularity encouraged them to give it up, *then* I'd care.

The last factor I noted involves Slack having some kind of distribution deal that they lost when the other company was bought out, which (I think) was around the same time MicroHat was gathering critical mass. So Slack suffered from that and never really recovered. But that's just my fuzzy understanding. I was using DOS at the time and had never heard of Linux.

I believe that it is the best but you cannot really go right into it. I started with the wasy based Linux (Red Hat and or Mandrake). I believe Slack is the best but for a beginner they might not think that. But to me it RULES !!!!!!!!

I'll tell you the one of the reasons I never installed it, the insufferable vanity of some of its users.
There are some who think that because they managed to install slack they are l33tness personified. Anything you can do with slack you can do with any other distro and much of the time you can do it with little to no configuration.
I never cease to get a kick out of seeing threads with slack users slapping each other on the back because theyre so 133t and on the same page seeing the most elementary of questions.