Damn - stole my line.

It is the truth though.

A brief synopsis of my travels:

1. RedHat 7.3
2. SuSE 8.0
3. RedHat 8.0
4. SuSE 8.2 (Loved this Distro. All down hill from this point on as far as SuSE is concerned)
5. Slack 8.1 (Loved the "vanilla" versions of everything, but too clueless to get it working - yet)
6. Aimless wandering (still running SuSE 8.2 as my main squeeze)

a.) Debian - hated it
b.) Ubuntu - hated it
c.) Debian - hated it, again
d.) Ubuntu - hated it more
e.) Kubuntu - WTF?
f. ) Slackware 9.1 - hmmm... A little more success this time. Looks interesting.
g.) Open SuSE - The longest install process ever - and ended up with crap - Good Bye SuSE

7. Slackware 10.0 - 2 things happened at the same time:

a.) Began to get a "clue"
b.) Got sick of trying new distros.

8. Slackware 10.1 - Slackware chose me and allowed me to keep it in my hard drive.
9. Slackware 10.2 replaces SuSE 8.2 as my file server
10. Purchased a subscription to Slackware and never looked at another distro (Except Knoppix).

Had I not tried other distros, I would not have appreciated the simplicity of Slackware.

Simplicity != Easy.
Simplicity = Not Complicated.

Not sure that makes sense, but it's the best way I can say it.

Cheers.

Where-o-where has the OP gone?

Why would you ask a question like this and then disappear, without acknowledging any of the respondents?

Strongly agree here. I know exactly what you mean. Well said.

I tried Mandrake and liked it okay, but it kept me separated from what Linux is all about.

I went to Debian and used it for quite a while. Periodically I'd dist-upgrade (not sure it this is the exact phrase for it) and if I had to reconfigure X, it would automatically boot me into X and I'd have to figure out how to get rid of that every time. I like to boot into the command line, that's just my preference. Then there was this thing called Exim that was part of the install. I never really understood what that was about.

Then I tried Slackware and it boots me into the command line and there isn't anything separating me from Linux itself. At first I was bothered by not having a lot of packages, but in time I began to understand that better. With 12.0 I was perturbed at not having xmms anymore, until I found out Patrick had been taking care of us by giving us audacious instead.

I have tried LFS and BLFS, but it never ran very well on my machine. Very sluggish. So I've been with Slack for at least a year now.

I discovered Slackware some years ago on a couple of cdroms in the back of a book in a public library. The book was called something like Slackware 95. The book explained everything. A travel office on the ground floor of the apartment block where I live had given me a couple of old computers with crashed operating systems and so I borrowed the book and had a go at an installation. I had no previous computer experience.
The whole thing went well. The only thing I had the slightest difficulty with was keyboard selection, I have a Swedish layout and strangly enough that problem has reappeared in Slackware 12. The book also explained how to use it after you had installed it.

I have once tried SuSE when it was free but thought it was just like an office packet which happened to run on Linux. I belive you have to pay now for Redhat and SuSE but would someone mind correcting me if I have the wrong impression of those distributions. Ubuntu I belive is free. I have DSL on a cdrom, its cleaver but I have never used it for anything.

At the moment I am working on a cross compiled Linux from scratch (CLFS) recommended to me through this forum by a another member so it will be good when I get there.

John

I don't even remember how many distros I tried. All I remember is that I ended up with a large (1 ft x 1 ft x 1 ft) shelf of my desk, filled about half-way with linux distro CDs and DVD, about 1/4 were coasters, but the rest were good. I bought the disks in bulk, so it really wasn't that expensive.

Nowadays we are more and more used to complexity in every part of our life. I ask myself why ? Almost nobody needs complexity ...

Murphys laws are more true than ever. Complexity is the enemy of security and efficiency.

Slackware is simple, straightforward, ultra-fast to install and for me the most important thing: Not overfreighted and foreigned with manipulated packages, "distro improvements" and other shicky-micky.

I would be interrested, how many slackware-installations are running worldwide.

My first bout with Linux was RedHat 8 back in 2002 in a computer class with VoTech. It looked interesting, but I didn't have a computer at the time to play with, so I didn't actually start using Linux until about late 2004 and it was Fedora Core 4. I installed it, and used it to pretty much just play UT2004. I then wanted to start learning about Linux, so I tried playing around with it, but kept getting lost, and kept having problems when the RPM package manager kept saying there were other required packages to perform the install.

So I went on about a year hiatus from Linux, but still had it dual booted with XP. Then I formatted my entire laptop, and dual booted XP with Ubuntu. I guess a lot of people liked it, I personally hated it. Was browsing forums such as this one, and was recommended Slackware.

Installed Slack 11, and even though I couldn't get my wireless card to work with ndiswrapper, I still primarily used it over Windows. Loved the simplicity, and the fact that it almost forces you to do everything yourself, which I really liked seeing as I was trying to learn linux.

Then Slack 12 was released with the 2.6 kernel as the default, got ndiswrapper working perfectly, and only log into my XP partition when I am at work. I would never go back to another distribution. I have learned more from Slackware about Linux in the last six months than I ever did from Fedora for the two years I ran that. Slackware is where I am staying.

List of OS I used:
DOS - simple and enough for what I did back in the 80s.
Win 3-3.11 DOS with GUI and some extras.
Win 95 - reverted back to 3.11 after a few days.
Win 98 - low level formatted my HD.
Mandrake 1.0 - learned for a while and started to look for other stuff.
Debian (dont remember the version) - couldn't detect my hardware.
Gentoo - here you learn a lot how to install a distro in 2 weeks.
FreeBSD - didnt supported my hardware
Slackware 9.0-10.2 - very good, no need to reinstall it every 2 weeks.
Fedora Core - always got my dependencies in a knot and had to reinstall.
First ubuntu - nice try, but not good enough
Win xp with sp2 - at last something from ms that is stable enough.
Dual boot winxp + ubuntu 6 - still a nice try but not good enough.
Dual boot winxp + Fedora 7 - only FREE as in AIR packages? Tried to add 3rd party dependencies which destroyed it.
Dual boot winxp + Slackware 12.0:
I had to compile a newer kernel to fit my hardware ( I have a new PC with latest hardware), and after doing so it took less time to bring XP up on a VM than on regular boot, go figure...
Strange, but when I need to edit something I still do it in vi and I trust the console more than GUI, I guess that Slackware's attitude to keep things very simple and stay the most UNIX like of all distros fits me just right

But I still think that if it takes tweaking to make an OS perfect, it is still not. It needs to be like this out of the box and no OS ever gave me 100% what I want. Slackware came closest, so I use it.

List of OS I used:
DOS - simple and enough for what I did back in the 80s.
Win 3-3.11 DOS with GUI and some extras.
Win 95 - reverted back to 3.11 after a few days.
Win 98 - low level formatted my HD.
Mandrake 1.0 - learned for a while and started to look for other stuff.
Debian (dont remember the version) - couldn't detect my hardware.
Gentoo - here you learn a lot how to install a distro in 2 weeks.
FreeBSD - didnt supported my hardware
Slackware 9.0-10.2 - very good, no need to reinstall it every 2 weeks.
Fedora Core - always got my dependencies in a knot and had to reinstall.
First ubuntu - nice try, but not good enough
Win xp with sp2 - at last something from ms that is stable enough.
Dual boot winxp + ubuntu 6 - still a nice try but not good enough.
Dual boot winxp + Fedora 7 - only FREE as in AIR packages? Tried to add 3rd party dependencies which destroyed it.
Dual boot winxp + Slackware 12.0:
I had to compile a newer kernel to fit my hardware ( I have a new PC with latest hardware), and after doing so it took less time to bring XP up on a VM than on regular boot, go figure...
Strange, but when I need to edit something I still do it in vi and I trust the console more than GUI, I guess that Slackware's attitude to keep things very simple and stay the most UNIX like of all distros fits me just right

But I still think that if it takes tweaking to make an OS perfect, it is still not. It needs to be like this out of the box and no OS ever gave me 100% what I want. Slackware came closest, so I use it.

You think it's possible to make an OS function perfectly without any tweaking ? It's hard enough (maybe it's even impossible) to make an OS function perfectly, much less without any tweaking.

Have tried Red Hat, Mandrake, SUSE... and finally get staked with Slackware 9.1.
It was 'love at first sight'.
Everything is in the right place, config files are simple and clearly commented, no frills and whistles.
The user who recommended the use of this beautiful distro told me: Learn slack and you will learn linux.
He was right!

I chose Slackware because I like it. It has great package management, it's not patched and tweaked beyond recognition, it's ridiculously well documented.

I mean seriously, look at the Slack community at LQ or the ##slackware IRC channel. They're they're both incredibly active and helpful resources... even if all you do is lurk.

I've noticed that, too. I wonder if he just wanted to get us all together at a "round table" to share while he sits back and watches.

I know exactly what you mean. I use a 240 capacity zipper case, half of which is full of nothing but computer discs(games are separate), half of which are linux discs - various distros, live cds and linux-based recovery discs.

No software is 100% perfect. The closest you get is that all of the features that you need work 99.9% of the time. I spent a *lot* of time tweaking Slackware on my laptop to get everything working the way I want, and it's still not "perfect". Is it Slackware's fault? No. Personally, I think Pat has done the absolute best that a human is capable of.

I have 3 plus 1 I did for a friend that you an add to your count.

I have 2 plus 1 I did for my wife's parents, so that makes at least 7!

For what it's worth (not too much I guess...), the Linux Counter shows these figures: