Howdy Forum,

Can anyone direct me to data, or an article with data and examples on who uses Slackware? By "who" I mean businesses, websites, research labs, people I may have heard of somewhere outside of a Linux forum

I'm curious for two reasons:

• Slackware, Inc. maintains a port for the S/390 --- how many customers do they have? most often for mainframes I hear about RedHat and SuSE.
  
• Whenever I tell other Linux users I use Slackware, I get funny responses (funny can mean either "humorous" or "weird").

Example:

Also, I'm interviewing prospective grad school advisors, and one of them told me his lab uses Linux -- which was a big plus for him over his competition -- and then we chatted a little about Linux; I told him I use Slackware, and he said "Whoa, now that's old-fashioned!" I told him, no big deal, if someone else is administrating it, then I'll use whatever distro. When I'm in charge, I like Slackware.

Now, I know from reading the history and a few other weird emails I've gotten that Slackware is the oldest surviving distro, and that it was at one time the dominant distro. However, I found out about Slackware just from reading on the internet and from trying out different distros; I use it cos I like it --- it appeals to me. What would I be using if I'd found out about it from a friend?

Thanks for any info,
Joel

Dunno..the fact that Slackware is The Old Distribution, is not bad: it just states that there's something good in it, as it still is in use. Many other distributions come and go. I don't have any statistics but I do believe nowadays people easily get Ubuntu, Fedora and others that have nicer, graphical installers, "ready" configurations out-of-the-box, handy package managers configured ready..but that's not actually a reason why they couldn't use Slackware either. Maybe those who laugh at you (funny, I've never heard -- all I hear about Slackware users is "they've geeks" though it isn't true either) just don't know what Slackware is today.

My guess is that those who use Slackware aren't that interested in advertising it; they're doing their jobs rather than boast with their operating systems.

We use Slackware on nearly 80 servers where I work. It was the choice of the person who was previously responsible for the location, and I stuck with it because I like it. I have always enjoyed slackware for it's simplicity and stability. My only complaint is that I would like to see Patrick begin to support 64 bit arch officially in order to take advantage of the new hardware in the market.

I've hardly seen much advantage in using 64-bit systems; all I see is trouble that overwhelms that little advance in using 64 instead of 32.

Having said that, I wouldn't either complain about seeing Slackware_64.

Did he explain what he meant by "old-fashioned"?

I think that would be hard to say about 12.0. Yes, there is no 64-bit nor SELinux, but otherwise it's very up to date.

Dennisk

He did not explain, although he was probably referring to package management, as he said he prefers Debian. As the youtube "Ubuntu vs. Slackware" video shows, Debian users are often quite proud of apt-get. To each his own.

I'm quite proud of using a system that feels old-fashioned -- only in the sense that my first heavy computer use was on SunOS and AT&T UNIX -- and is actually more modern than anyone else's (surrounded by Mac and Windows). I loved it when Steve Ballmer said "Yeah, Linux is fine if you want a clone of a thirty-year-old operating system." Yeah, that's right: thirty years of improvment, instead of another clone of a thirty-year-old operating system (VMS) and thirty years of board-room design.

@roreilly, it's okay if you prefer not to mention where you work with the 80 servers using Slackware. That's why I asked if anybody knew of any businesses or websites: a nice side-effect of the discussion would be being able to say "Well, ya know www.flippinstiltbikes.com uses Slackware."

Thanks,
Joel

Well... I know that www.proan.com has and uses Slackware on their web and mail server... because that's one part of my job and I personally installed and configured that server (though I didn't do the webpage, and... it's horrible)

Though I don't quite get why would you want to know or what are you trying to prove there. Maybe you wanna hack it? Be my guess, give it a try

I use Slackware as my primary distribution. If you're getting funny responses from people whom you tell about your own use of Slackware, it's because they don't know a damned thing about it. Slackware is one of the oldest and most ROCK SOLID GNU/Linux distributions available today. It is a fabulous choice for business or server applications. About the only distro I would recommend other than Slack is Debian.

Yeah, apt-get is mucho COOL, but Slack's package management is fine and dandy. You can enhance it with Swaret or (in Slack based distros like Vector and Zen) use Slapt-get. I started out with Ubuntu just over a year ago. After playing around with numerous distros, I came to the conclusion that Slack is the best of all, for me. I'm still a big Debian fan, though. You'll notice that all the distros I run currently are either Slack or Deb based... Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Mepis --> Debian-based / Slackware, Vector, Zenwalk --> Slack-based.

Have FUN!

I haven't experienced Linux in any business environments, or even encountered more than a few users other than myself, but I read a lot here and on linux.org. I think most people that are moving from Windows to Linux want the easy point-and-click interfaces and wizards and automatic updates. Even veteran Linux users who've been distro shopping tend to settle on "easy" distros like Ubuntu. They tend to refer to Slackware as not user-friendly, difficult to configure and install, lacking features, blah blah.

The truth is Slackware is designed to be minimal with little overhead. When I was distro shopping I knew what I wanted - the most UNIX-like distro, and that is Slackware. Pat has done a great job of keeping Slackware what it is and not following suit behind the distros that decided to include more software and eye candy. The minimal installation is something that drives others away - emphasis on commandline, default runlevel 3.

When someone tells you Slackware is "old-fashioned" just tell them "That means Slackware is doing something right." Slackware is THE oldest surviving distro.

I see, slackware is good at hosting webpages with cute farm animals...I would count giving me a webpage in Spanish, when I clicked on "Ingles" as pretty bad, horrible may be pushing it. I'll explore and see how horrible it is

I'm just the sort of person who likes to know things. I get lots of funny reactions to that, too :P No, the real reason is -- oh, wait, yeah, I'm just curious. Like I said, I only hear about RedHat and SuSE, to many people "Linux" is synonymous with RedHat.

I'm not trying to prove anything, I'm still going to use Slackware, even if I find out Micro$oft uses it

Joel

I've been happily slacking since 10.0, for me it is my distro of choice. In my school district where I work I am starting to see a small influx of Linux work stations ( Ubuntu, Debian).
Slackware is perfect the way it is.

Actually the webpage part is mostly incomplete and hasn't had any update for months, that webdeveloper is one helluva slacker I'm sure. Oooh and I freakin' hate flash-based sites without an html option

That server has one year and three months up and running online, it started with a Slackware 10.2 install but now it is a major mixture of several packages from 10.2, 11.0 and some security updates from the latest 12.0, with a lot of up-to-date, custom-compiled sources for qmail, spamassassin, ClamAV and greylisting mail facilities.

It's a headless machine (without a monitor plugged in), so it does not have the X server, graphics goodies packages nor any window manager installed, pure CLI over ssh it is all it needs. The thing does not even know how a monitor looks like ... LOL XD

We have other linux servers here, some other 10 machines but all with RHEL3. Those servers provide inner network services and some SAP applications. Mostly just a bunch of outdated and overworked, reliable linux machines. Those servers were here before I arrived and are managed by my workmate, so I have nothing to do with them (yet, I would love to upgrade them to Slackware but they are actually working ok so better not mess it up)...

I also know from good sources that my university's mail server at bonaterra.edu.mx uses qmail on Slackware. Not the web server though, it's relayed over another server which I don't know what's running.

Probably you've never heard about the portuguese architects association but their web site (http://www.arquitectos.pt) is running on Slackware (with PosgtreSQL and mod_perl - two packages I would like to see on Slackware... but that's another story).
Also, the (main?) portuguese open source software mirror (http://darkstar.ist.utl.pt/) is powered by Slackware Linux.

Since Pat doesn't modify Apache source to show something like ApacheX-xx Slackware GNU/Linux (a la Debian) it's hard to find on what Linux distros some web sites are running.

the computer pools at my university were switched over to slackware after running suse before and i guess some servers at the datacenter are running it too.

I use Slackware for personal use. I have a website http://www.hclg.org/ (Joomla- PHP/MySQL). I also have a email server(sendmail) running on that machine. I am going to rebuild it someday and install QMail (qmailrocks.org).

At work I have a Slackware machine that run a few web based applications I wrote. It set on the bottom rack and never give me any problems. Can't say the same for the Windows servers.

A while back I rewrote the website for all my companies divisions. I installed Fedora since the guy "in charge" liked it. It was a big mistake. Yum is a piece of junk. Come to think about it, I don't think the guy in charge ever used Linux. He talked a talk, but I don't think he ever walk anywhere.