A friend of mine installed slackware and he simply can't stop talking about how fast it is. Is it because the RPMS are compiled for 486 rather than 386, or what? Is there any way I can do it with other distros?

Slack does not use the RPM format, so can't have something to do with that ...and the packages (.tgz) are compiled with 486 support but are optimized for 686 (check the -march and -mcpu flags). Probably isn't a magic speed trick here either, since that approach sounds quite normal and reasonable. I believe the reason Slack feels so fast is that it's not bloated...it adheres to the KISS principle (keep it simple, stupid). Haven't really looked deep into it, but compared to mainstream distros like Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSE etc, Slackware flies.

Mandrake? We all know that Mandrake isn't going nowhere...

Yes and with every new release, there always something major wrong with it when you install (destory (9.2) Drives, Can't Boot (10.0) into any partitions.
LOL

I believe with Slack most services are turned off by default. With a lot of other distros, a lot of unneeded services are ON by default. This slows things down. And with Slack the packages haven't been customized for the distro like they are with other distros. They're just the way the programmers wrote them. I don't know if that makes them run faster, but there's generally less extraneous code in Slack that could be potentially buggy.

I just tried another distro the last few days on a separate partition. It had some nice features but messed things up so bad i just blew it away. I'm back to Slack and feel like I dodged a bullet.

Siri Amrit