So I burned the latest release onto a DVD and sat down to install it on my laptop. I've been running Ubuntu on it for some time, as I'd have nothing but trouble in the past with 2.6 kernels in Slack. But, you know, new version, 2.6 without too much fiddling, thought I'd give it a try.

With a little googling and a little downloading after I'd done the vanilla install, everything works. Literally. Everything.

Nvidia Graphics and 1280x800 resolution? Done.
Broadcom wireless? Done.
All the necessary libraries to run Abiword and Gnumeric and Amarok without having KDE or Gnome installed? Done.

So, here I sit. The laptop's on the network. I've got the fastest and IMHO best word processor, spreadsheet, browser, music player and chat client installed. I've got XFCE tweaked just so to make me happy.

What happened to Slack being a tinkerers or hobbyists distro? This machine is ready for anything your average user could ever want, right?

i concur, Pat V. is as much an artist as a great builder of Linux out of the box, i been using Linux since 1999 and Pat. V.'s Slackware is the finest distro there is, it is put together so well with an artistic talent and craftsmanship that only years of experience could bring...

Nothing has really changed, Slackware's goal has always been to be a powerful yet easy to use distribution. It is still a tinkerer's distro in the terms that all of the hands on configuration is still done at the config files; Slackware does not have its own GUI configure utilities (unlike Red Hat/Fedora). But the idea was to have everything work.