Good point. For me, the problem wasn't that I couldn't figure out how to solve the issues I was having with Ubuntu, it was that the people developing Ubuntu made some decisions on how things should be packaged that, after a time, I found either constricting or confusing. Maybe the biggest thing that bothered me was not having a root account by default. The other thing that bothered me was that people on the Ubuntu forums were exceptionally helpful -- posting the exact instructions to do/fix something -- but they did not seem to explain how or why that fix worked.

So I read a great review of Slackware that is as true today as it was in 2003.

Here's the best parts from the review:

That sounded pretty good to me. After a little more research, I decided to give Slackware 11, which had just been released, a try. I tried SUSE 11 (I think) on my laptop at the same time and really liked it for a while too. Eventually though I just ran with Slackware on both machines. I haven't looked back.

Is that a package management pun?

Regards,

I don't do much "system administration" using the command shell. Slackware does include KDE, and that has many system administration tools. One can manage users and groups, check disk free space, monitor processes and CPU / memory use, and do all sorts of other things required to maintain the OS.

Slackware installation takes about the same time as Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, etc. It takes less time than Gentoo. The point is that one only has to do that every 6 months or so (less if you upgrade). What I find more important is that Slackware always installs. I might have trouble getting X-Windows configured and running, but I've always got a working Linux OS and command shell. There have only been a few computers with fake hardware RAID or unusual SATA controllers where I've had to do other things. With Slackware setup it's obvious when the hard disk can't be detected and it was pretty obvious to me how to load a driver module for the SATA or RAID controller. When Ubuntu didn't detect my hard disk I had no clue how to build and load an SATA or RAID module and load it during setup.

I'm sure that I could have gotten help from the Ubuntu users but I like to be self-sufficient if I can. I prefer to read the documentation myself. I've had much better luck finding information about Slackware than other distros, and the information is usually correct.

On most computers I only have to use "cfdisk", run Slackware setup and then "xorgsetup" and I'm up and running. The longest part of the installation is file copying and I can enjoy my coffee or go do other things during that time. I tried one other DIY distro that I won't name and found that I had to sit in front of the computer for each painful step and would frequently discover that the step-by-step installation instructions or WIKI were incorrect. Slackware does most of the heavy lifting by providing an already compiled and working OS while still providing the mostly vanilla source for everything included.

Compiling and re-compiling source isn't necessary for me to "know" that the source matches the binary files in my OS. Sure, I might learn some intricate details about how Linux is put together by starting from scratch, but will that knowledge be useful to me? I have no plans to create my own distro, and the few intimate details that I need to know can be learned if and when I need them. To me it seems a huge waste of time building my whole distro from source when someone else can do it better and faster. People who do maintain a distro have to know all those details and spend all that time. Slackware has proven that a dedicated group of people can maintain a high quality distro and still keep it open and flexible.

Distros Like Ubuntu are easy to install and use until there's a problem or a need to do something differently. I had a lot of trouble finding the information I needed and an even harder time finding out why something was done rather than just what command to use. I felt like someone gave me a pair of roller skates and shoved me down the hill. Yes I was going really fast, but the end was not going to be pretty. Slackware is more like gradually learning how to skate, maybe falling down a couple of times, but eventually learning how to use the skates. You don't get the immediate thrill of speeding along but you also don't get the sudden and painful crash. The little bit of extra time to install and configure Slackware is worth the important concepts that one learns during the process.

It isn't odd when other's experiences are taken into consideration.
It's hard to run something like Slack, Arch, Gentoo etc and be adverse to learning.
Everyone's needs and want's are different though.
In my case, I depend on my pc's but I'm also not adverse to using them for entertainment.
Some distro's are bleeding edge and I've ran them.
I've also spent time fixing them when I really needed them and was grateful I back things up and could transfer things to my back up box.
I'd rather not worry about an update breaking something when I can't afford it.
Other distro's software is old as dirt and called stable.
Imho, if things are so old things don't function, it's broken and can't rightly be called stable on my box/s.
That's as big a headache as bleeding edge.
Other distro's are patched to death and appear cobbled together when looking under the hood.
I'd rather not try and figure out the reasoning behind all of that.
One example that had me shaking my head was a well known distro that still runs kde 3.5 but also offers up evolution.
That's cool.
Evolution is a Gnome app,,, but they "fixed" it so that it now requires a kde 4 lib as a dependency,, even though the desktop is kde 3.5.
But wait,,, it gets better.
The kde 4 lib is really a Bluetooth lib,,, and stored in the kde 4 section of their repo even though kde 4 isn't offered yet.
With Slack I may spend time setting things up, but I spend less time fixing things, zero time trying to fathom bizarre reasoning, zero time worrying about an update and don't bat an eye about an update.
My work gets done, I learn things at my pace and not because I have no choice in the matter, plus I have fun.

i began with computers with CP/M, then DOS, and was kind of slow to install windows (finally broke down and installed wfw3.11 in 1995 because i wanted to be able to do other stuff while my BBS was running). so, i'm not afraid of a command line interface. at the same time i was a window$ user for a long time, but to keep on top of my abilities, learned as much about the "nuts and bolts" of whatever OS i was using. i tried installing various distros of linux over the years, but could never get everything to work the way it should. if i set up Samba, it often broke something else, if i installed wine, it would break kde. a friend swore by slackware, and gave me an install CD (slack 7 or 8 i think). about this time i was working for a company that maintained banking equipment, and would regularly get a stack of hard drives shipped to me by the field techs. i had some old DOS based tools for doing some "repairs" on these drives, such as partitioning and formatting and low-level testing, but win2k, NT and OS/2 partitions were something i didn't have the tools to "fix". i installed slack on the test machine, and soon found that linux could do some "fixes" on these drives, and also that linux's disk tools weren't so heavy handed as M$ disk tools (M$ Fdisk doesn't just edit the partition table, it overwrites the MBR and wipes the FAT at the same time) not only was i able to "fix" a lot of these disks, but in some cases restore all or most of the data from hosed partitions. the linux box would even automatically sense and load the driver for a SCSI card to work on some SCSI drives that were in the stack. using an X client on my win98 office machine, i could do all of the work on several of these drives by "remote control". this got me somewhat hooked on linux, slackware in particular, since i had very few problems installing or configuring it, some of it from the GUI, some from command line. everything installed mostly worked together well. i recently made the switch totally to slack, after a hardware upgrade required a reinstall of windows, and i ran head on back into M$ "sledge hammer" disk tools. win2k refused to reinstall unless it could take over the MBR of the first disk, and then it didn't like something about the new hardware and wouldn't install. winXP wanted to completely take over whatever HDD i was trying to install it to, and kept claiming "you have exceeded the maximum number of partitions for this disk", even though there was only 1 other partition (a linux partition). somewhere in the process XP deleted a win2k partition with 30G of data on it.... i have had less trouble with slackware than i had with windows, and even had a couple of instances where i tried something stupid, breaking something in slack, and all i had to do to fix it was reinstall the package i hosed.

i dont find much difficulties. initially you may have little problem, gradually you will stick to slack. in fact,compared to other distros whatever problem you face, can be fixed in slack.
i have started everything from our old sticky(now almost outdated),
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...it-all-174447/
(thank shilo for the great work)

these days i found ubuntu very difficult to configure. they have moved the original locations of the basic configuration files.

1. i felt slackware more transparent. even the installer itself is simple.

2. slack will not take much resources, it is sleek.

3. i never had crashes in slackware.

4. all the configuration files are in their respective places . and each file is well documented by pat himself. and most system folders have readmes.

there are lot of help files available, and most important is this LQ forum. very active helpfull members. i learned a lot from this forum.

then slackware is for you.
slackware ships with tetex instead of texlive, and i dont find any difficulty in using it. please install kile from sources.

the package manager is simple, because of that it is not crappy. i found most of the other package management crappy. they claim that their's is soo good, but u end up with broken softwares.

for your simple use, if needed, the necessary packages can be compiled from source using .Slackbuild.
otherwise many third party tools are available for making packages. .

http://linuxpackages.net/ is place where u can get nice packages.
now i prefer Slackbuild over all other packages.
please check the available packages shipped with slack13. almost everything is new.

deoendency checking is hard thing to arcive right, and most of the time it is implented very worng so user has to go insane dealing with installing programs (Red Hat was #1 for getting it wrong).

instead of broken system, we get working system.

and of course Slackware has the best documentation i ever saw: it's simple, it's open, and it says what you need to know for installing your system. i always had very weird combination of hardware on my system (now it's AMD CPU, ATI chipset and NVIDIA card). Slackware never ever gave me any problem related to hardware configuration. it just worked nicely.

i like *nix and Slackware gives me *nix

Amen! Not that long ago, I removed the coreutils package by accident (it's a long story). I put in my installation disk and reran setup, choosing to install only the coreutils package. Everything went very quickly and I was up and running with any data loss in a very short time.

Regards,

Wall clock time.

I didn't accept all the defaults; there was a lot more choice than I recall in ubuntu; I made a mistake and couldn't go back to rectify it so had to start over.

When the base installation was complete there were several (~20?) extra packages I wanted. For each I searched Slackware, SlackBuilds, Alien BOB's, Robbie Workman's until finding it; those found took several commands (and more-or-less build time); some I did not find so I downloaded the source, studied how to build to fit with Slackware conventions (mostly just using --prefix=/usr on ./configue) and installed. That took a lot longer than ubuntu's aptitude install <package name>.

I am not complaining; there are advantages to having done things this way (one of the reasons for changing from ubuntu to Slackware was that I increasingly found reasons not to use ubuntu packages) but the time elapsed, from booting the installation media to having a system ready for day-to-day work, was longer -- quite a lot longer -- for Slackware than it was for ubuntu.

Slackware is good because of all the reasons that others seem to dislike. The package management is exactly what I want. Slackpkg and pkgtools handle above and beyond my expectations for maintaining and upgrading my Slackware packages. The packages that come default with Slackware are exactly most of what I like and use daily also. Most anything else I can find on slackbuilds.org or simply create my own slackbuild for the package. There are many tools available to help with this task also.

There are also packages in Slackware default and on slackbuilds.org that I simply am unable to find on most other popular distros or even in their repos. I won't go into naming them though for me it's frustrating to get on a system and expect a simple tool to be available and it's not.

I have yet to have my system fail me without it being because of something I did and when "I" did screw something up I either knew exactly how to fix it right away or at least where to look to narrow down the problem. Slackware has the durability of an ak47 with the precision of a high powered sniper rifle.

Slackware's greatest strength is in it's simplicity. Most the configurations are done in very well noted text files that are easy to understand and edit. If you want httpd to start at boot, edit the file to your liking, make it executable and away you go. Not having to use a gui program to set everything is a big plus; it just works.

I also like the fact that Slackware doesn't assume anything about how you plan to use the system and does not try to hold your hand or tell you what you can and can't do. It's not like being thrown out to sea and saying here sink or swim. No, it's like being put out to sea with a very versatile vessel that you are the captain of. Accompanied by a fleet of slacker ships with very knowledgeable and experienced captains.