There is similar thread here. But it's focusing on Slackware features important from novice user.

In old book about UNIX administration authors are mentioning Slackware. But today it difficult to find book about a Linux administration mentioning Slackware.

My answer is sure but not at present stage of its development. I will be happy to set service on a Slackware but once stable is released and enough long time tested.

This is for the sake of my own good opinion. People around don't care what kind of system is used. Technical explanations make things only worse.

There are two groups of users now. People thinking about personal use and those who think about solutions provided on base of Slackware. To satisfy expectations both these groups seems to be more and more difficult.

Now simple statistic would provide us answer which of these groups is growing in size. If we find trend there it may determine Slackware future no matter of our BDFL plans.

You missed one group, those who go out of their way to make things more difficult than necessary, just to able to pat themselves on the back.

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It is not going to be "Slackware future" if you are going somewhere else with it than our BDFL decides. At that point you can call it whatever you want, but your fork won't be "Slackware".

Oops! Is that meant to be me?

Seriously I always thought that the stability of Slackware would make it an ideal distro for servers. Only until recently it didn't include pam and without pam, apparently you can't have ldap, which you need for hot-desking. Since the upcoming release does have pam, perhaps it could be pushed more as a server distro.

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Slackware is predictable. Debian is usually touted as stable but no less than apt was very recently exposed as anything but stable. OpenSUSE is better in my opinion, but they have a habit of chopping and changing their ideas and plans for the distro. With EQT involved, it's anyone's guess what the long term plan is for Leap. We all know what equity entailed for the famous North American Linux distro.

Slackware is predictable, and businesses like predictability more than anything. A five-year wait for the next release doesn't bother a business, who couldn't care less what Plasma desktop it ships with.

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No.

Slackware is not a good choice for business:

If I was Willy Wonka, I would not use slackware to automate my chocolate factory, because slackware contains blobs. These blobs might report to Slugworth, Fickelgruber, or Prodnose ( other candy makers trying to steal my recipes).

Freenix, on the other hand, is a good choice for business!

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That's probably WHY the RHEL dominates the business with its 90% of the cake? Yeah, because it has no blobs, probably...

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I currently run Slackware on dozens of small servers at work, so it's good, at least for me.
I maintain a few custom packages, eg. updated LAMP stack (mariadb and php), monitoring (icinga2) and in-house software.
As Gerard Lally already said, Slackware is predictable and stable.
I don't have to cross my fingers before running apt-something hoping nothing gets broken by updates that I don't need and care about.
Most servers are not Internet-facing, so they can just keep running with no need of 0-day patching; before the kernel mitigation updates, a few of them were over 1000 days of uptime.

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Yeah, same here. All of my findings are the same as yours. Being able to drop in a SAMBA server is invaluable in a small office. Also, the combination of OpenVPN & NFS has made life easy for off-site backup and remote working.

I use VMs a lot, which means that it's easy to spin up a special purpose server and not have to worry about things like licensing.

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Yes, a herd of fools: 90% or more businesses make terrible decisions every day, generally choosing convenience over ethics over and over again; and there's even a larger herd of fools licking the boots of the first group.

Short term profits with long-term catastrophic consequences--that's the model for that 90%, and they can all just eat their own bootloaders...

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Slackware might be both a good and a bad idea for a business:

A. It is stable and reliable = good for the peer business who is relying on the service and paying for the deployment of it

B. It is stable and reliable = bad for the peer business who is deploying it and maintaining it - as there is little to no mandatory maintenance to be performed and (usually) no bugs down the line to be addressed - leading to less revenue from additional manual labor (plaguing those outer cough cough! options)

I'd say depends.

And i used it for a while circa 2006/2011 as a mail server, advanced router and domain controller (we had an registered domain and we hosted all its services on Slackware based computers - with our literal ports on the internet (with elaborate firewalls up of course))

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Well, always depends on someone's perspective...

I for one, I consider your bunch a herd of masochists who lives in an Imaginary World.

BTW, your pals still sells 20 years old HP laptops which "respects owner's freedoms" ?

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Speaking strictly as a herd of one, from the Real World, the "respect for user's Freedom" test is t-h-e all important go/no-go decision point. My declining base of still running, useful, productive Freedom respecting / Slackware powered older hardware have become irreplacable treasures of much more value to me than anything new.

Since the defeat of the Free Software movement, and the acceptance of crippled, treacherous hardware and software by the delusional 90% herd, the test among current offerings is no longer "respect for user's Freedom" as there aren't any choices that meet that test in most categories. Now it is reduced to "tolerates some user Freedom". As the Imaginary World of the 90% drags us all deeper into this technologically reinforced Dark Age, I keep paper, pencil, slide rules and printed durable knowledge in good supply against the now inevitable day when that test no longer produces a choice - soon.

In the end the technology is not itself of any particular importance. Free human thought, understanding and truth based activity is the only thing of importance and the technology's only actual value is the degree to which it facilitates that end. If the latest, greatest and most powerful tech no longer does that then it is at best useless, at worst an active interference.

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You have the "freedom" to choose whatever hardware you want. That will be what determines whether you need firmware blobs or not. You are welcome to remove linux-firmware any time you like.

Don't blame Slackware for shipping firmware for functional drivers and call everybody else "fools". That's worthy of mockery, that stance.

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