curious about Slackware

[GNU_man]

I've noticed much raving about Slackware distro. so i'm wondering what the hype is about. Any slack fans care to comment?

oh yeah... i would DL and try it out myself but i don't have an extra computer to experiment on. ( i just finished installing FreeBSD on my 'ol PII for the 'true UNIX experience') Slackware must be a killer distro though...

[Vergil83]

first slackware is very bsd like (it used /etc/rc.d scripts for example).
It is fast, lean, and very solid. It is a diy distro. It is also the oldest still surviving distro (if I am not mistaken). I am sure others will have some words too

[dylunio]

I've only been using Slack for a couple of months now, but one can see its stability, and speed, which are the two things that have made Slack famous. When I compare it to SuSE on speed running KDE Slack wins hands down.
One thing to remember is that the 10.* seires of Slack still use the 2.4.* range kernel since the developers thing it is the stablest kernat seires at the moment, and they with only implement 2.6.* range when they think it is stable enough for use.

dylunio

[serz]

Slack is a great distro.. you will like it if you use FreeBSD, it uses BSD init-scripts like no other distros

[Krendoshazin]

slackware is fast, stable and secure, it only incorperates stable packages and stable vanilla kernels, also it only incorperates these once the full range of tests have been run on them and modified to the point of satisfaction.
if using a command line tool compared to a gui tool is faster, more secure and less prone to bugs, then slackware will choose to use command line tools, which it already does. this sacrifice of user-friendlyness leaves most people saying that it makes things too hard to learn, i say it offers a learning curve that other distro's just don't offer, how much can you learn from auto-setup or clicking a button anyway.

take for example your internet, where most distro's will set this up for you, you have to set it up yourself through netconfig in which you'll learn that your connection uses dhcp to have an ip allocated to it, or ppp in the case of dialup, it's little things like that, or in a lot of cases, big things.
you might hear a lot of the time people saying that slackware is easy, but i think they've got mixed up as simple is one of the words used to describe slackware. it's simple in the viewpoint of system design, rather than ease of use, such as being the only distro to still use bsd style init scripts, unless the distro is derived from slackware like vector linux of course.
people always think they can do something better, that's how most projects get splintered.

it's not for people new to linux as it requires a fair bit of pre-knowledge to get it working nicely, but once you reach that point it can be as easy or as hard as you want it to be. the only real beef people have with it that holds any weight behind it is that it doesn't do automatic dependency checking, but this can be overcome with programs such as swaret should you wish.

my current uptime:
13:05:52 up 22 days, 9:20, 2 users, load average: 0.06, 0.06, 0.08

[Fallen Angel]

Slackware is one of the oldest distros. It's very stable and a very fast. I use only Slackware although I tried several other distros but Slackware is the best for me. If you learn to work with Slackware you will be able to work with all other distros.