A Look at Slackware Linux 10.2 5501

Anonymous Coward

This might be true; but I remeber I used Debian Woody (before the release of Sarge). It was very old (much older than Slackware) and has definitively more bugs. Things might be better now than Sarge is released but unless the Debian team change their way of working the same problem will arise again in a few year.

Yes, but it is also partly due to the fact that in the mid 90, every linux user was a "die-hart linux geek". Linux now has a broader market share and become used by users that want only a desktop system. This is a very good thing but it is true that Slackware is inappropriate for such users. Although the market share of Slackware has surely dropped, I am not sure the same conclusion can be done if we count the Slackware users as is, not their proportion between the linux users. I would find a very bad idea if Slackware tries to become more like other distributions; with bleeding edge features and a bunch of GUI tools to (automatically) configure the system. It would loose its stability and would not reach the user friendliness of the other distributions; cumulating the disavantages of both type of distributions.

A

I use Slackware as a desktop system (I have not a lot of periphericals however: basically just a printer). I had tried other distributions and the problem was that the GUI tools where often somewhat buggy and I was forced to manually edit the config files; which was harder than in Slackware. I think that Slackware is a good choice if you know how to edit the config files. If you do not want to care about that; then it is better to try an other distribution.

As a last thing, something that I particularly appreciate in Slackware is that it ship unpatched software. When I use a piece of software, I like to use it as originally develloped.

Olive