Thank you for the review: I also have a positive experience with Ubuntu LTS releases; we use both Ubuntu and Kubuntu at the office. But when I have a choice I always install Slackware because I feel more at home and because with Ubuntu things break from time to time for apparently no reason, usually as the result of an update going wrong, and then you have to start googling the fix to the problem. Under the apparent simplicity there is a lot of complexity in the system.
If you can deal with these problems it's a good system to use but I notice that when I fix problems for my colleagues it is because I have learned how things really work in Slackware. For example, all our computers are installed with the LUKS encrypted \home partition; this is not possible with the Ubuntu installer, which uses a different encryption method; therefore I setup the partition manually just as I learned in the README_CRYPT.TXT Slackware doc. I am not willing to give up understanding the system.

Thanks for the review, but honestly I don't like Ubuntu that much, at least not Unity.

My main distro is Slackware and I have it on my desktop PC, and Xubuntu in my laptop (which is a Dell). Of course there are differences, but I still prefer to use Slackware, for some reason I feel Xubuntu more like plastic, and Slackware more natural and responsive.

Anyway, everyone is free to use whatever OS they want, because we live in a free world.

i found xubuntu-s xfce to be very polished
best out-of-the-box distro, if you ask me

Thanks for the comments.

My main computer is still happily running Slackware_64 14.0. I think I mentioned it above that the Slackware machine feels slightly snappier than the Ubuntu machine despite the better specs on the Ubuntu machine. The Slackware computer only has 2 Gig of RAM, while the Ubuntu computer has 8. I'm using XFCE as the DE on Slackware, which may account for a lot of the difference. For years, XFCE is very efficient, which may explain why it's so responsive. That's not to say that Ubuntu is unresponsive, it just feels a little slower. I haven't looked at things in top yet, but I wonder just how many resources Unity is using.

As a side note, just like I was surprised at how much I liked KDE 4, especially after all the bad press it got when first released. Similarly, I'm kind of digging the Ubuntu Unity interface when I fully expected to hate it.

That is one of the things that I love about Linux in general (and Slackware in particular). I love that with Slackware, I can very easily switch among KDE, XFCE, WindowMaker, and TWM (plus a couple of others) right out of the box. (I actually use TWM as the WM when I log in as root and want a graphical interface for something.) More importantly, I like the fact that we can customize a Linux installation way more than other operating systems. I would also agree with many of the sentiments above that Slackware makes it easier to customize than Ubuntu.

I beg to differ. Give MLED a spin, which aims to be an out-of-the-box Slackware+Xfce configuration. Among other things, it solves some of Xubuntu's usability problems.

There is always a wow moment when Slackware or LFS user tries one of these shiny mainstream disros. I had one several months ago with Mint-MATE. I was impressed running it live and decided to install it on my netbook.

The install went well but after the reboot there was no OS to boot. It turned out that GRUB didn't like lilo.conf on my test partition with Slackware-current and the installer didn't inform me that I actually had no boot loader installed. I renamed lilo.conf and this time GRUB installed fine and detected Slackware on my test partition. Next annoyance was OpenShot. When I selected it for install it pulled kde5 frameworks and qt5. Then the desktop froze when I hovered the mouse over a mp3 file and I had to press the power button long enough to shutdown. Disabling audio preview "fixed" the issue. Then the update manager started popping up several times a day. Then X crashed. It turned out that the intel driver was really old. I remembered having this problem in Slackware and compiling a newer driver fixed the issue. It took me a considerable amount of time to find out what repository contains a recent driver version. Then I had to check some option in the package manager that allowed me to make my system unstable by installing the newer driver. The honeymoon was over.

Back to Slackware. I have to look after some 185 packages. But the audio preview works


Cheers

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I think there's always a lesson learned about cookie cutter and mainstream distributions. They look nice on paper, have wonder toys, and tend to appear favorable in testing, but when you get into specialized usages, development, day to day activities, and other things, the evidence of how poorly designed these systems are suddenly makes itself well known and forward.

LFS, CRUX, Slackware, and Gentoo/Funtoo all have sound and stable branches and whether you build from source or install binary packages you know it will work.

Absolutely agree. The best Xfce distro.

Libranet was a near-perfect cookie-cutter distro, but that was in 2003, back in the pre-Ubuntu days. As for the other distros, same experience here. Lately, even Debian started to disappoint me. So Slackware it is.