Hard to say a "when" because time lost it's flow and meaning after my first born came into this world, but Slackware was before then, so the best I can judge is late-90s. I started off on RedHat then Mandrake, and both confused me with differences to what everything I read linux had currently supported hardware wise. Both were patched to high hell and almost nothing was a stock "vanilla" install. I got fed up plenty trying to learn linux. I know I dual-booted Win98 on my laptop and when I gave linux another shot, it was slackware. I had always checked the changelogs and based my trial and usage of the other distros on what slackware was doing, but I was too scared to try slackware... I felt I didn't know enough to give it a shot.

The version escapes me, but I know it was zipslack, since I could keep my safety net of Win98 and I was a heavy zip drive user back then. Still my need for a more powerful way to run my server than my ever crashing Windows install could do, would soon no longer evade me, I was determined to learn linux. Not just any linux, but Slackware Linux. It had to be version 4, it still had 8.3 filenames, the disksets were not as simple as they are now, and we still had Gnome. It wasn't long before the 100MB limitation of zipslack became a hindrance, and I moved to a full install. I remember the version jump from 4 to 7, so I know I was using by then, but I mostly used slackware to run my server at the time, and learn web things with. Still to this day, I run Slackware on my servers, but I stopped using as a desktop for many years, as the salesman Mr. Jobs did a fine job in luring me into his web, which I do still have and use Macs, these days ALL of them run Slackware.

We didn't have a ppc port that I even looked at much (I recall we had Slackintosh, but that was short lived like most offshoots end up). Any time I needed to get *nix software running on my Mac (which was very often since it's the only software I knew how to use at this point) I'd consult the SlackBuild to build everything on my Mac (macports and brew may of existed back then, but I didn't care. I install from source, damnit!) I remember playing for hours with Apple's X11 toolkit for OS X with things built based on SlackBuilds. Though all that faded away as time passed, I still kept up with Slackware, just didn't have a local pc any longer to use it on, the catalyst was the switch back to Intel on Apple hardware, that's really all I needed. All my Macs happily dual-boot MacOS/Slackware, though I'll honestly say, I rarely boot MacOS these days, except on the M1, as Slackware on there is still very fragile, and I'm prone to breaking things (I never did write any docs on how to do that, oh well).

I've been very PC-based in my free time use this year, got me slackin a lot more than usual, but if I have a device capable of running Slackware, you're damn right it'll be running Slackware before long!

I've been using Slackware since 1993.

I've been a user since '95-'96 time frame. Moved to Switzerland in '92 with my old PC, believe it was a 486 with two 20mb hard disks. Dialup modem.

I have been using Slackware for 1-2 months so far and I love it. I'm in my late 30s now but I tried Slackware in my late 20s and back then, I couldn't install/run it on my laptop and I was brand new to Linux...

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Since 2018. Funny, it feels longer.
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...re-4175643511/

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Slackware 3.0 or 3.1, UMSDOS version, around 1996.

Since installing slackintosh 10.1 on ppc g4 xserve, around 2006.

Since 1995.

When I was 14, I'd already tried Red Hat and Mandrake on my AMD K5-PR133 with 24MB of RAM and a 1GB Quantum Fireball, and after reading a magazine review of a server decided to give Slackware a try. Downloading ISOs wasn't realistic over dialup so I bought Slackware 8.0 from The Linux Emporium (I still have the CDs), subsequently followed by the official CDs for a few releases. I used it on and off over the years, but not seriously until the end of Windows 7 support 3 years ago when I started using Slackware exclusively.

The best way of dealing with Broadcom wireless is to replace the wireless modules with ones from better manufacturers, they're pennies on ebay. I got fed up with wasting time trying to make Broadcom's rubbish work, better to use something from a manufacturer that doesn't make things intentionally difficult for the FOSS world.

Start with Walnut Creek "Slackware 96" --> 6 CDROM - Using a PC-i386@33MHz
Slackware 3.1
release date 1996-06-03
Kernel-2.0.0 update to 2.1.17
NOTE: Named "Slackware 96", an allusion to Windows 95 (from wikipedia)

Started daily driving Slackware since 2020. Before that I used Fedora, *buntu, Bodhi Linux and Puppy Linux.

Started Dec 96 with a cdrom from the Book titled Linux Secrets by Naba Barkakati. I think it was slackware 3.0.

2002 mandrake
2003 Suse
2005 ubuntu
2006-2012 slackware {slackware leet (my favorite ever)}
2012-2019 No access to PC and no OS for 7 years...
2020- end of life Slackware.


ps: Not much young people in SlackerLand ...

Hmm... that means you were helping us out with editing chores at Slackdocs long before you were actually running Slackware. Did that influence you any?

Since fall of '94 when I signed up for a shell/ppp account with the local unix users group. They had other proper UNIX machines, but the 486 with slackware was the most useful. My first time installing slackware (with a friends help) was spring/summer of '95 when I finally built my own PC. Did a fresh install with a bit more space shortly after to get X installed and working. Remember hearing some horror stories about people ruining their monitors...glad I wasn't one of them! Since then, I've always had a slackware install, but mostly just servers or firewalls, etc. X wasn't the same on PC without the Sun keyboards extra keys and follow focus.