I dunno - I think it would make a good distro for a beginner. It tends to 'teach' good habits. Maybe not for a beginner who was on something time-critical but if they're just trying to set something up for personal use or if they were doing something on an enterprise level but had time to migrate when ready rather than by deadline.

Every distro has every range of users, both in attitudes and abilities. Some rich people are @$$holes and some aren't. Does that mean you'd never install money in your wallet?

Cheers


Word!

HAHA blazed

Dude -- "the insufferable vanity of some of its users"?? I'm always wary of sweeping generalizations, but in this case, I'd have to point out that bragging that "[distro] Rulez!!" isn't exactly confined solely to Slack enthusiasts, just check any of the popular message boards. Besides, what's wrong with having a favorite, whether it's a sports team, car, band, or Linux distro? I guess I'm just confused as to why anyone would look down on someone else who has decided that Slack best suited their needs, and wanted to promote it. Honestly, how would that be a bad thing? As for the comment "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'd say Well, sure, and by the same token anything you can do in [distro] you can do in Slack, usually with little or no configuration. I'm just not sure I see why you want to denigrate Slack. -- J.W.

YEa
I mean there are so many people who use slackware just love to do all kinds of mod and config, during installation it just makes you learn DUDE

Besides, it's true that there are a lot of people out there who think they are "3l33t", just because they have installed Linux on their machines. Usually a Mandrake or somesuch. At least with Slackware, you can start digging into /etc/rc.d/ and stop the services you don't want quickly and easily, and not through a stupid buggy GUI.

As to the newbie question, you have to be honest: any open forum such as this one is going to attract newbies -- real system admin do not need to read linuxquestions.org!

Then again, I have seen some fairly advanced questions on this forum (and on others)...

To add my contribution to this thread: Slackware is popular with people who know what they do. Most Linux sysadmins I know use Slackware almost exclusively on their servers. And I mean Slackware, not Red Hat, not Mandrake, not Gentoo, not SuSE, etc.

IMHO, Slackware is not as high-profile as other distros because Patrick Volkerding is the only "full time" programmer who works on Slackware. Other distros are more well-known because they are controlled by corporations, who actually pay people to do marketing and to conclude "business alliance" with other companies. Think Red Hat with Oracle, or IBM, or SAP (etc...). Do you think Oracle will sign actually sign a deal with Slackware? Yeah, right. Oracle wants to deal with another large company, not a single guy working from his home office!

Patrick (and Slackware) can't afford (or don't want) a full-time marketing staff. That's why Slackware is not as "known" or as "popular" as other distors who can actually afford full-page ads in newspapers and trade magazines.

BUT... On the other hand, that means Slackware is still what it has been since the beginning: a stable, polished and "conservative" distribution, created and maintained by -- and for -- the Linux community.

Slackaware is something that you can install on a machine somewhere, configure and leave, confident that it's not going to crash or go berzerk on you. Something that only includes what you need, and not the tons of eye-candy and useless GUI stuff that is pushed by marketing as necessary to sell more.

In short, Slackware is a user/community-driven distribution, not a marketing- and sales-driven distribution. That is what makes it better, because Patrick Volkerding includes only what **he** himself would use in this distribution.

This being said, feel free to prefer another distribution!

Well I have used distros with a fancy installer and hated them. SuSe 9.0 has YAST (Yet Another Stupid Toy), and I hated every bit of it. Why? Maybe because SuSe didn't include new versions of any software and their update program is just for patches and not program updates. I had SuSe on my HDD for maybe a week, then deleted it and gave the extra space back to slack.

Slack is the fastest distro I have used and probabaly the closest thing to BSD that I will ever use. It is stable and works with all of my hardware. I started with slack for the reson to learn linux. I have never used RedHat or Mandrake and proud of it.

Ok, I think I have ranted long enough.

digiot:- "MicroHat" LAUGHSOUTLOUD!
m0rl0ck:- I just wish i was as elite as you.

uh.... i don't know what ya'll be talkin bout, but uh.. . slack is on top to me. The best distro ever created.. THANX Patrick!!!

Distributions come and go, remember Ygdrassil? RedHat became the dominant distribution out here because it was the easiest to obtain before broadband and cd burners. It was the only distro I ever saw on cover disks. Meanwhile Slackware still has a reputation as a hairshirt distro, not even true these days as swaret can resolve dependancies. Live CDs like Knoppix have probably grabbed a large market share from the "easy to install" distros.

I don't feel "3l173" for having successfully installed and configured Slack.



On the contrary... I found it a lot easier than Red Hat or Mandrake, mostly because it was all in plain, basic, straightforward text.

Nothing too technical, nothing covered up by shiny graphics designed to make people feel comfortable, nothing complicated.

Heck, I think it's easier to install and configure Slackware than it is Windows 2000.

I can set Slackware up to install exactly how I want it, without going to any real trouble to do it.

Ever tried to get Windows to install in any other way than "one size fits all"?

Heck, even trying to get Mandrake to do that is a real pain in the ass.

Slackware isn't "3l173". It's basic. Smooth. Streamlined. Nothing more than absolutely necessary.

Simplicity isn't difficult. If Slackware users seem to be engaging in a lot of "back patting" it's because like myself, most of them were initially surprised at how simple Slackware really was to set up, and are happy to discover that Linux isn't really that complex when you strip away some of the stuff that distracts users in other distros, stuff that distracts them from really learning the inner workings of the OS itself.

Because when you strip that away, Linux is pretty easy to understand. Slackware does that. And it makes us happy.

So piss off.

I think that is a bit unfair considering how helpful so many of them seem to be. I recently moved from Mandrake mainly because MDK 9.1 arrived without gcc or any of the devel rpms needed for installing tarballs, and I had reached the stage of compiling quite a lot of those. I had a terrible time getting back to the stage I had reached with 9.0 and then realised that to avoid this again I would have to buy some mega dozens of CDs setup just to be able to install a 10kb tarball!

I had read about Slackware and decided that perhaps I had reached a sufficient level of experience and confidence to give it a go. When I found a magazine with the full 9.1 on a dvd together with lots of instructions I bit the bullet and went for it. I would never go back to Mandrake now, but if I had not come through Mandrake I would never have had a hope of coping with Slackware as a total beginner. So they all have their places in the scheme of things, and the easier it is to install and run the likes of Mandrake the more people will switch to Linux and the more will then filter through the system to Slack as they gain sufficient experience. I think that is a healthy situation for the growth of Linux.

Regarding the original question: Popularity != Quality. J.W.

How right you are.

I am switching to Slackware for that reason. Don't give a damn what anyone else thinks about which distro I use. More interested in what Kernel my distro runs and about learning some Linux shell commands and other under-the-hood stuff.

I have to throw in a plug for dropline. I started with slackware because it was the only distro that would install on my laptop when I was experimenting with Linux. I ended up sticking with slack and installing it on my desktop for 2 reasons:

1. Dropline Gnome: Dropline gave me a useful desktop right from the start. I still learn new things about slack all the time, but by using dropline I had a desktop that I could use on a day to day basis while I learned (and I am still learning). The main I didn't go back to XP was because there wasn't much of a reason to.

2. The community: I have had quite the opposite experience that m0rl0ck had. Whenever I have had a problem there has been someone here or at the dropline forums that has helped me out. I hardly ever see a RTFM NOOB type post at either forum. I tried to get gDesklets to work over the past week and I couldn't believe the atmosphere at their forum, after I saw the first post that said 'Don't ask questions like that here, that's basic linux stuff' I decided I didn't want to use gDesklets anyway.

Well that's a great reason to disregard a linux distro. "Some people who use Slack talk like script kiddies, therefore I won't bother with it."

Regards,
nightwulf