Suffer a distribution developers whims and fancies...?
That's the duty of every end user regardless of positive or negative.See "how to pick a linux distribution" for more information.

I'm sorry but I thought I would blow the dust off this a bump it along the way since it's a thread containing a very common question about two to-often-overlooked distributions.

And by the way, will the word "linux" ever NOT be considered incorrectly spelled by this forums spell checker? Haha!

I stumbled upon Zenwalk when searching for a lightweight Linux distribution for my old home PC which was running Windows 98 and had no internet connection.

I burned one CD with the main installation and installed it. Mostly everything has been working perfectly since then. There is still no internet connection and so sometimes I make a wishlist for updates and applications to download. So far I didn't change any of the default applications, and I'm quite happy with xfce. I still remember browsing the list of current Linux distributions when the word "Zen" struck me.

I haven't been using Slackware for ages. For a less-minimal distro I'd rather choose Debian anyway, just because it's so well-known and documented and you can tell your customers if they might ever ask you "why did you choose this kind of Linux?" Is Slackware still using KDE? I haven't seen KDE for ages as well, just Gnome all over everywhere.

Zenwalk, Debian and Slackware are all great distros.AFAIK KDE is still the most popular Open Source Desktop Environment, but Slackware does not support GNOME, unless you want to try some community supported packages.

Chris