Slackware, revisited, again

In response to a post on linuxquestions.org, in which the writer expressed some concerns about the direction of Slackware based upon experiences with his particular hardware configuration and the new concepts introduced in version 12.0, I posted the following response. You probably have heard similar things before, but here we go again:

I had a difficult time installing 12.0 myself - having to do with the display driver and a couple other things. Having used 11 for so long, I simply reverted and couldn't be happier (well, a few things still leave me booting into Vista for more than patching security holes and updating AV software).

Good point about distro flavors; I don't know how concerned Patrick is about losing users to the Ubuntu/OpenSUSE/Fedora empire, but I like slackware precisely because of the lack of overhead that those distros incur with all of their SELinux and hal/automated hardware tools, not to mention the package managers. Having used Slackware alongside Ubuntu and OpenSUSE for some time, for development purposes as well as routine web browsing and office use, I really appreciate the stability, predictability, and efficiency of Slackware. It boots in half the time, and runs twice the apps, twice as fast. Not to mention that server configuration is a nightmare on the others, and Ubuntu's desktop of choice is Gnome - even with Fedora, starting with Gnome immediately shows some of the dispositions of the distro - KDE is so much more customizable and comes with so many apps. Gnome is a very nice desktop environment and I think the GTK concept has spread in a wider sense than KDE's equivalent. Maybe I'm just predisposed to KDE because Mandrake ran it (my first distro) and Slackware has come exclusively with KDE.

In short, hackers like Slackware for its hackability, and dislike the "black box" (no pun intended) method of other distros. Having not ventured into Gentoo (but a few steps) , I cannot speak for the other distro that appeals to hackers, and Debian never caught my eye for any period of time.

Finally, Slackware is my distro of choice, even if I will practically have my own slackware distro after all the mods.

Registered Linux User #370740 (http://counter.li.org)