ILUG-CAL: A First Sight Review of Slackware 9.0

“We talk of the good, bad and the ugly and with the distro wars
on the usenet getting fiercer with every new distro, each offering
seeks to creates its own niche and gain its own fifteen minutes of
fame. ‘Simplicity is divine;’ and these words don’t hold much truer
for any distro other than Slackware. I have sometimes sat down to
try and figure out what gives Slack, its dedicated fan following or
what makes Patrick Volkerding a demi-god despite the fact that
there is no state of the art package mangement system like RPM or
DEB… no hint of visual coherence across desktop environments…
no fancy front-ends for administration… no bloated office suites
to play with. And all these questions can be answered in one word
–‘Simplicity.’ Perhaps that is the single most important factor
that makes people care and in turn make Slackware 9, one of the
standout distros of early 2003.

“Slackware has never even bothered to revamp their installation
interface, despite the fact that Mandrake, RedHat and SuSe have
upped the ante in this area of end user experience. All said and
done, Slackware does remain the easiest distro to install, with the
minimum of fuss and the least questions asked…”

Complete
Story