This is actually a review of 13.1.1, the current release.

Having had problems installing the live CD, I tried again with the installation only disk (dead CD?). The problems I'd had with the live CD were not experienced here.

The installer is fast and, if not as elegant as those of Fedora and Ubuntu, easy. One warning: make sure you think before you type, as there is no "go back and do that again" function. That is particularly important when you install the boot-loader lilo. Don't choose the expert option unless you are absolutely certain that you are an expert, for you if you can't answer the questions there's no going back to the automatic installation without rebooting. As said in the documentation, you can choose between a full installation or a minimal system (GUI or CLI) to which you can add applications later.

The full installation gives a good selection of software appropriate to a lightweight desktop: gnome office, midori browser, claws email, pidgin, mtpaint, geany, exaile audio, and whaaw video. Although Salix does not support Gnome, it does add Gnu software to its Slackware legacy, including gnucash.

Some people criticise the gslapt package manager for not sorting programs by category, but it is very fast compared with the Ubuntu and Fedora installers.

Media codecs can be installed from the menu and they all work. The video player parole that I'd admired is here replaced by whaa. This has the tendency to go black if you choose full-screen or fast-forwards. I replaced it with mplayer. Why do so many distros have a poor default player (think totem)?

I chose this version partly to try LXDE. I think that still has a way to go, and I'd recommend Xfce.

If you want the stability of Slackware without the hassle, Salix can now be considered a viable option, along with Vector and Zenwalk. In fact, I'm posting this from Salix.