Just curious. What made you choose Slackware over other distributions? And did you use any other distros before settling on Slackware?

My first distro was Dream Linux maybe six or seven years ago. Fell in love with it's interface but I couldn't get the liveCD installer to work, so I switched over to debian stable, which annoyed me with outdated packages that broke when I tried to upgrade things. Then I quit using Linux period for a few years, then after switching back and forth between Debian testing and Slackware, I installed Slackware 13.1 and found 100% out of the box compatibility with all my hardware and mostly up-to-date packages, and lots of annoyance with manual configuration. It's been a fun learning experience and I haven't looked back.

I'm proud to say that Ubuntu has never touched my computers :P

Strangely enough, I installed Slackware when 13.1 came out earlier this year because I thought it would be fun to check out one of the more "technical" distros and possibly do a review for my Linux website. I wound up switching! Up until then I was a Debian user.

I switched to Slackware back in 2005 because Mandriva won't boot to my first laptop. Since then, i migrate all of my desktop/laptop to Slackware and follows -Current until today

i don't think i will migrate to other Linux distribution for another 10-20 years

I just wrote a blog on this matter. I tried several distro's,but Slackware eventually prevents me from messing up my system. I like to tweak a bit to much - but Slackware forces me to think before I act. You can read about my experiences here.

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I came to Slackware from MCC-Interim, which I used briefly. I almost went for TAMU, but for whatever reason I chose Slackware instead. No idea why really. I guess it must have been the cool sounding distro name or something.

I started with Mandrake when it was still called like that. People say a lot of bad things about distributions that hold your hand in the first steps, but it's obvious that I wouldn't be using Linux today if I didn't start with Mandrake. It made it much easier for me to install a Linux system given the level of knowledge I had at that time, and provided me with a simple system I could toy with and learn all the Linux basic knowledge like the command line, Unix permissions, the filesystem layout, etc. This was, I think, in 2000 or 2001.

Later, I found that many things in Mandrake were specific to Mandrake and I wanted to move to a more standarized and vanilla system, so I installed Debian. Debian is a distrubution that I loved back then and I still consider it one of the best. I remember I installed Debian Woody when it was marked as stable. I was very happy with the system for a long time, but it eventually started to show its age. I didn't want to move to testing and Sarge was not going to be released soon, so I looked for another distribution to continue learning, and between Gentoo and Slackware I picked Slackware. I was on dialup back then and didn't want to download and compile all the sources in case I installed Gentoo. It could take days. That's basically the reason I picked Slackware, answering the topic title question. So a friend of mine downloaded Slackware for me and I proceeded to install it.

I've been in love with it since then due to the simplicity of the system. I started with 9.0 if I recall correctly, so I'm not an old-timer at all. Later, I moved to -current and I've had the same installation since 2004. I've moved it from computer to computer and even switched from 32 to 64 bits recently, which is completely unsupported but I decided to take the step anyway just so I didn't have to reconfigure the system. It worked, so I suppose I'll continue to use slackware64-current for years to come.

I didn't pick slackware, it picked me.

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I started with Linux in 2002 with Caldera OpenLinux 2.3. Caldera later morphed into the hated SCO....boo-hiss. After Caldera I ran Red Hat 9 until Red Hat went to their enterprise versions of Linux. I've also used other distros (Debian, Arch, Mandrake, Suse, and the Buntus) and several of the BSDs. Around 2004 I tried out Slackware 10.0 and loved it, and I have used Slackware ever since. Slackware makes sense to me, it is logical, elegant, and very robust.

I started with Kubuntu, I liked KDE but configuring was too clickety-clickety windows like for me. I distro surfed for a little while and landed on Slackware 12. It fit like my favorite pair of boots, I'm here to stay.

The initial atempt was redhat 5.2 back in 2001 if I recall correctly. Then was my first major distrohopping (4 distros around) with Suse, CalderaLinux, Mandrake Linux and Debian (Slackware was presented to me as something to dread and respect). Then the BSD days came (FreeBSD and NetBSD). And Slackware (9.0 I think)... and the world changed... Everything became more clear... It became the numero uno distro for my servers, and resided in my Laptop and Office PC for well over 2 years without any change...And yes..I use Ubuntu now, but only because I have very little time (due to production) to mess around with the dependency hell, in order to install the apps I like..Still, Slackware is THE best and most stable distro I have ever used..Cheers to that

my first serious use of linux was in 2008 when i used ubuntu 8.04.after becoming more familiar with linux, moved to zenwalk.learning zenwalk gave me confidence in using the CLI of linux and i read somewhere that zenwalk is based in slackware.so, when the next upgrade of zenwalk was released(i think zenwalk 6.0),i chose instead to try slackware.first installation of slackware is 12.2.it just seems that my computers liked slackware.no problem in configuring my computer.

p.s.

i have in my laptop version 13.0 since i have a problem in 13.1 about my wireless card not being able to turned on in 13.1.

I came to Slackware back in march 1994, I don't know the version, but the kernel was about 1.0.
Back then I had no networkconnection and even no CD-drive.
So I orderd a package of Linux at the little german startup Suse who in the early 90's (before creating their own distribution) purchased Slackwarepackages. I got a package with 56 floppydisks and installed Slackware.
The installer was the same (well, similar) as nowadays and also the series "a", "ap", "d" and so on. The installation took several hours.
I remember I had a 210MB harddrive and some month later upgraded my RAM from 4MB to 8MB which made the compiling of a new kernel much faster.
Kernelconfiguration was much easier than nowadays because Linux wasn't as complex since then and I had not much hardware, no network, no Cd-drive (not to mention a burner which was not invented) , no soundcard, USB wasn't invented.
Otherwise I had not much documentation and the system did not work out of the box like today.
Configuring the X-server was really exciting since it was said that one can damage the monitor when configuring the wrong frequencies (which did not happen).
I tried some other distributions in the last years, like Suse, Arch and Gentoo, but I always came back to Slackware. Now I'm dualbooting Slackware and Gentoo on my computers.
Slackware is not simple, but it simply works.

Markus

1997. IBM had essentially pulled the plug on OS/2 after Warp4 and I didn't feel like returning to using Windows outside of work. Red Hat and Slackware were the only distros anyone ever heard of. I made a stack of floppies for (as I recall) Slack 3.1 and got busy. Chat scripts for modems were the bane of my existence. Followed closely by LPR and printer drivers.

I went through a period around 2000 where I liked SUSE 6.1 for building home routers, and nowadays I tend to play with Xubuntu on laptops and with Mythtv and such. But when I actually need to get work done, it's still on a Slackware desktop.

I started using Linux in about '06 when I started attending college classes at night (most of which were centered around A+, Net+, and the Microsoft certs). I had a month long "starter class" on Linux, where showed us how to install Fedora 6 and how to get Beryl running. Needless to say, I wasn't as impressed with the wobbly windows as I was with figuring out what was under the hood. I was hooked.

I went through Fedora, the 'Buntu's (and Debian), and then Arch. Arch came real close to what I was looking for, but it wasn't quite there. When I landed at Slackware it was awesome. Everything just worked. It had Fluxbox out of the gate. X and audio were painless. Getting the network up was a breeze. I only wish I had tried it sooner.

A couple years ago I decided to get take some online college courses. I bought a new Dell Studio1737 laptop and began. A couple weeks into the courses (when the intensity increases) I found that my os(vista) and expensive anti-virus software where doing nothing to help me. I did nothing sketchy to get a virus, but every few days my computer would refuse to connect to the school servers. The anti-virus company wanted me to spend another $179 to un-screw my machine. A friend told me to Google search UBUNTU. Since then, I have a library of distro-DVD's. Somewhere, I heard about Slackware and now I dual boot Slackware/UBUNTU.

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