It's not really dictatorship. If to build analogy in this direction, this is more like feudalism with all the attributes like feudal fragmantation with couple of seniors and nominal king, serfs and subsistence economy.

Nice try. The only huge difference is that I enlisted all the shortcomings.

It's a benevolent dictatorship. Our maintainer has the final say on what is added and removed from Slackware. Period. Mr. Volkerding makes the final call on Slackware development.
He has a trusted group of Slackware developers who do an amazing job assisting him with our next stable release. This development model works.

This is false. You need an initrd if your specific system requires it. If you're not using LUKS or LVM (which based on the forum, is probably the vast majority of people using Slackware) and using a huge kernel, you don't need an initrd.

And the -current installer now generates an initrd and sets the system to boot off the generic kernel. Pat has long preferred people using the generic kernels (and has said so in the documentation on the installation media), but has finally decided to make it automatically use the generic kernel.

You mistake that since you need to do things to the bootloader or fstab after that everyone does. I was able to boot that test system without touching the bootloader or fstab beyond what the installer does.

How hard is to to download the whole ISO and write it to a USB drive? I really don't think using the usbboot is very common.

You're not required to use the installer. The installer is there to help people install Slackware, but you can still install Slackware without it.

Keep calling us a cult even though we are no different than passionate users in other distros. We like Slackware as it does what it needs to do for us. If Slackware were changed for every user who came in here and complained about something (or many things) they don't like, Slackware wouldn't be what it is anymore. That might be better for you, but it wouldn't necessarily be good for the current Slackware user base.

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Well, if most of the "intended" slackers do full install, I am not surprised about low demands of an "average" slackware user. They really don't need anything, they can just switch to NT 4.0 SP7.

Are you talking about -current? :-)

Slackware installer doesn't help, it misleads and distracts potentially new users.

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They don't need anything special in the installer. If you stay on the forum, you'll see a lot of people have modified Slackware to fit their needs. Some have added systemd, others have made it into a DAW, others have rebuilt it from scratch.

Slackware, and its installer, is designed to get someone to a good starting point. Where they decide to go from there is up to them.

Stable release ISOs are obviously available on pretty much any Slackware mirror, but -current ISOs are generated by Alien Bob and provided through several different mirrors. A simple google search of "slackware current iso" will lead you to several of those mirrors. You can also generate your own ISO using his handy "mirror-slackware-current.sh" script, which is designed to mirror -current, but can be used for any Slackware tree on a mirror. I use it to mirror -current and 14.2 onto my personal network.

How does it mislead and distract new users? Other than a few times specific input is needed, generally hitting enter a bunch of times will lead to the installer succeeding in installing Slackware. From there, you reboot and you're greeted with a login. Continuing to read the documentation will lead you to create a user and issue startx.

If new users are keen on setting up lvm or luks, they probably have enough experience with Linux to be able to make the needed adjustments that the installer doesn't provide. Pat does not intend on Slackware being a distro for everyone.

I do this far too often...

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The last stable version is 14.2 . This is what can we really talk about. It is outdated but there is no other stable release. Anyone running -current should be aware that it is unstable system. Such person should be ready to resolve issues on its own. And be ready that problems, crashes may appear. So who is that hypothetic new potential user? The picture tells us that the person needs to be advanced Linux user first of all. Do you see many such people around willing to stop using distro they use now to switch to Slackware? Don't think so. We may talk about new potentiall users when Slackware 15.0 will be officialy released.

How's this working out people?

I am in pain. Please let this thread die. It was done by page 2.

I'm telling you for your own good: Stop wasting your time.

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Sorry I just couldn't resist .

In fairness, I've never said I was done in this thread, even though others have...

My wife has felt the pain of that xkcd comic many times throughout our marriage.

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Well, TBH -current is more stable than Arch.

Mind your business and don't bother us :-)