Hi everyone. I'd like to invite you all to Up Slackware position by clicking the 'Slackware' entry on Distrowatch.com. Why? This way more people can see how live is the Slackware Distro and community and that can end up helping Slackware and Patrick. That's my opinion. What do you think? Let's try it?

I doubt it's worth the effort.

I think Distrowatch is far less influential than persons who pay attention to Distrowatch think it is. But I'll do it just in case.

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It can't hurt. Done!

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I like the idea of improving Slackware's popularity. Somehow the request swatted cobwebs and resurrected a long forgotten memory.

Back in the early 1990s I knew a guy who was well advanced into computers. Some city radio station DJ conducted a popularity poll. There were three choices in the poll. Typical poll with two legitimate choices and one silly choice.

The poll was done by telephone. People only needed to dial and press a 1, 2, or 3 for the respective choice.

He programmed his computer and modem to dial, vote, and hang up. For two hours. For the silly choice.

When the poll finished the silly choice was the clear winner. Everybody in town could not believe or understand the results.

A funny prank. No, I won't disclose names.

I think more than a few people lost faith in polls that day. I am one of them.

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That's not about your fate but others ;-)

That's all about ethics. Fortunately I have few (but strong). Done (I sometimes do it anyway).

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Slackware is living in the past still, that is why it doesn't get downloaded much, I know, I used to be a Slacker way back.

I chose to use Debian a long time ago, most people want a simple working system right from the start, they don't want to be bombarded with choices when they do the initial installation.

I took another look at an install disk the other day, it's still the same unfriendly choices.

Slack is just as good as any other distro, but it just isn't friendly to install - unless you just load everything.

Not many people need compilers & other stuff, that gets installed with the 'easiest' way to install from your disks.

Upvoting your favourite distro won't get many more users, because when they go to install it, they are more likely to just give up & use something else.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

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What "bad news"? You are a single opinion, and we all know about opinions.

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I agree that the Slackware installer can be frightening for newcomers, but do not understand in what regard a full installation can hurt, unless you don't have 12G available on a drive to install it. Please enlighten me.

PS I have a Slackware64-14.2 system in 4.6G, but that's on a 24G VPS that I rent and I didn't even install it as it got it initially in a Qemu image.

I don't think Slackware is going to win any popularity contests on DW these days. The DW ranking is just what people are clicking on DW lately, and does not reflect actual usage. I'd be willing to bet that Ubuntu is still the most-used Linux distro.

Fret not about popularity, young padawan. Keep calm and use Slackware.

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"... projects listed on our page hit ranking (PHR) chart are not organized by popularity, install base, or by quality. The PHR chart just shows how many people are visiting a project's information page. The chart tends to favour newcomer friendly projects - DistroWatch often attracts people who are new to Linux and wondering which distribution to try first and this causes beginner friendly projects to float to the top."

From latest Q&A on DistroWatch: https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20200316#qa

Can't really see what value such a list represent for Slackware...?

Or should we start a "up-the-list-war" with other distros users? Doesn't make any sense either...

And from what I've picked up over the past year digging through old threads and archives, I imagine Pat couldn't care less.

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Somewhere in DW (too lazy to look) even they say the ranking is meaningless.

But newbies to Linux may take that poll seriously, to bad DW does not make this distrowatch.com more apparent instead of the poll. Slackware is still in that list

DW metrics are pointless.

Even if we artificially moved Slackware into the top 10 it wouldn't stay there very long. Slackware doesn't appeal to the turn-key-click-to-intall-all-the-things design of the more popular distros, and all the 'hardcore' Linux users are into Arch Linux these days.

A stable release would work the best TBH. I'd even throw in a couple rolls of toilet paper along with my purchase.

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I have a relative who is new to Linux that wanted to distro hop. They want Microsoft Update without Microsoft. We tried Linux Mint, the Live disc failed to boot. A few others had a boot issue too. They are all a blur to me, thinking about it makes me want to drink. Debian couldn't load X. I have no idea what happened there. It should work with open source drivers right out of the box. Fedora had some bizarre issue with the terminal where it would freeze. They really seemed to like Fedora and they didn't understand my confusion over the terminal freezing, but ultimately they didn't like it because the Chrome web browser wouldn't load a website they like because they said it was too old. So next is Manjaro. I couldn't figure out how to get Manjaro's GUI installer to delete Fedora, the text installer looked like a headache, so I had to go back to Slackware and use gparted to remove it. Then it installed and seemed to work normally. My relative likes the GUI updating thingymajiggy in Manjaro. They have gained new appreciation for Slackware and Slackware Live was the easiest distro to install for me. The problems I had with other distros were probably related to that computer but still what a pain.

Anyway I think Slackware will get some attention when Slackware 15 comes out!

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Debian doesn't install a lot of necessary drivers, they have to be downloaded & installed from 'non free'. A distro I often recommend is MX Linux, it's a mid weight distro running XFCE, debian based, lots of newcomers seem to like it.

(For myself, I like a lightweight distro called AntiX, no systemd, Debian based.)

P.S. I used to run Salix (basic) for a while, so I'm not anti Slack.