It's the best!

I voted FreeBSD, since it is the only thing I ever tried that I liked a little bit.

But honestly, I think I would start a quest for my new "default OS of choice".

Probably I'll settle on one of the slackware-forks/followups that will undoubtly emerge.

A lot will depend on when we ("the community") will notice that Slackware has disappeared.

I will try to hold tight Arch because of it's philosophy close to Slackware

According to Distrowatch, Frugalware also has a similar philosphy to Slackware's.

Well I'm playing with Arch due to my house being overrun by relatives.....I get in less trouble if it looks like something is broken! Anyway, while I do like the finished product, I'll have to say that the Slackware idea of simplicity seems to vary a bit from the Arch idea of simplicity! The final product seems very similarly set up to Slackware at least more so than my Vbox experiment with PC-BSD.

I definitely like the Slackware option of full install/limited dependency issues to the Arch method of extremely basic initial install followed by lots of additional installation via dependency checking package manager, although pacman is quite simple to use and the AUR (Arch User Repository) is very similar to SBo or ports. The end product is very fast and at this semi set-up stage it boots in next to no time to a login prompt. My blog has a much longer opinion piece.

It always works for me

After more then 18 month with slackware only on all my pcs I was pry and installed Calculate Linux last weekend and I'm very deep impressed. Calculate Linux should be 100% compatible with Gentoo. I installed the CLD (with KDE 4.4) and CLDX (with xfce 4.6). Both installations succeeded fast, smooth & easy, both implementations are absolutely completely localized, the customizing and the selected apps are meaningful reduced, both version are very fast (64bit). Personally I like the slender xfce-implementation much more than the (IMO) overdressed KDE-desktop. The port-system of gentoo seems to be very smart.

So Calculate could be a very serious competitor of slackware for me.

IMHO,
Slackware is my choice for lots more than just plain control:
1. *most* software runs on Slackware *most* of time (=compatibility)
2. Slackware "just works" *most* of time provided once configured, compared to *any* thing. Only wrist watches have more uptime AFAIK (=reliability)
3. While above holds true, decently fast, comparative with fastest solutions. (=performance)
4. While all above holds true, most maintainable solution this far. (=maintainability)
5. AND upgrade able AND update able AND spans more stations resource wise than any other comparable distro. (=scalability)
6. Has the most human oriented "guts" i saw so far (=controlability)
7. Has one of the most competent user community I like so much here (=future)

It's a though question, but only Debian matches compatibility, while sacrificing maintainability and control to a reasonable but not much lower level.

ARCH is too much "how to easier walk foot by foot" for my taste? And too much "make" for an older station (PII/PIII class aka "thin client" class) to get the ball rolling.

=2c

Stevan C.

I find it interesting that a lot of people would pick Arch. Personally, I used Arch for about 1 1/2 years and then when Slackware 13 was released I switched back. Yes, Arch has some nice features but there were some core differences from Slackware that I thought would keep most of the users away from it.

Arch is very bleeding edge. Packages are updated fast and furious and sometimes unstable things seem to creep in. I found that my system was just not as stable running Arch. I prefer to run the latest stable version of Slackware and just do the security updates.

Arch also seems to be the kind of distribution that drags everyone along to the latest updates. (almost like -current being your only option in Slackware) I prefer the manual way with Slackware. With Arch, you have to do specific things to not install the latest software in case something breaks on you and you end up wanting an old package. Then you have to try to figure out how to get the old package back. I don't know if I had something misconfigured with my system but I found that to be a very non-trivial task. Supposedly the old packages are still accessible on the system but I couldn't find them where they were supposed to be. Maybe I was clearing the cache on updates though. I can't be completely sure.

I still recall a period of time last year where the kernel was updated practically on a weekly basis for a couple of months in Arch. That bothered me a bit. I'd rather have a kernel that I can hold on to an recompile to configure specifically for my system. When versions change that often you end up with new options and deprecated old options and it just becomes a nightmare to try to update your .config file for every new release.

Don't get me wrong, I did like many aspects of the system. I'm not sure whether I would actually return to it though if Slackware died. I'd probably go through a period of depression (ie - distro hopping).

I'd definitely go through a period of depression if Slackware ceases to exist
It seems Arch is like -current in Slackware, but that's what I use on my desktop. Things sometimes (rarely?) break, but those are the times where I have learned the most.

But it wouldn't be something to run on my wife's desktop then (she's running 13.0 still, but will move to 13.1 soon) or on a server (mine's running 13.1 since last Sunday).

I have no clue as to what I would run as a stable system if not Slackware. I have used several "flavors" at work over the last few years. Some I have "accepted", others I have learned to "avoid".

I also tried {Free,Open}BSD but simply never "got it". It simply does not give me that "warm, fuzzy feeling" that Linux gives me

Maybe that was an oversimplification. Even in -current Pat seems to be quite conservative. Another thing that bothered me about arch was that if a package that was updated was broken you would generally put it on the list of packages that wouldn't be updated so you wouldn't be prompted to update it every time you did a pacman -Syu. But at that point, how would you know if a new version came out that fixed your problem?

Just to be fair though, the really nice thing about Arch was that if you installed it, you really wanted it. No such thing as a default install that included junk that you would never use. If it was installed, it was something you requested or a dependency of something you installed. That was nice.

Honestly though, the only time in the past year that I can recall Slackware actually crashing was my own fault. I had dolphin open and it was "focused" on a video file. I leaned on my keyboard accidentally and held down the return key. This caused it to auto repeat and open at least 50 copies of that video. The system slowed to a crawl. I gave up on trying to stop these processes and rebooted. Oh wait, maybe it wouldn't actually have crashed. I just wasn't patient enough to wait.

Long live Slackware.

Yeah, I gave Arch another go last week and it does run quite well, I just don't really like it. The BSDs are rock-steady stable, but, they're not for me either. I gave up on FreeBSD 8.0 a little while ago. I'm like you, Niels; I would feel really lost without Slackware. Slackware-current is bleeding edge enough for me.

George

It's like I said in a previous post: I never used Arch, but I had some contact with the Arch community and they seemed really helpful people.

I did use *BSD in the past, but it was a bit tiring to hear the sermons about how Linux is "not-the-way-to-go" etc.
It seemed like going to a different church on Sunday. I *do* respect them (history etc.) but I just don't feel "at home".

I'm playing with Arch on one of my systems, and once I got it going, it feels just like my -current system on the same hardware. The getting it going is a lot more manual than Slack. For instance to save myself some time I just scp'd /etc/X11/xinit/* over since installing KDE and Gnome didn't give me xinit.kde/gnome. Arch has two of my favorite Slackware features that make it a good second option: text file configuration and a helpful/knowledgeable community. On the other hand, it doesn't feel as "finished" to me as a distro and I much prefer a fuller initial install to the umpteen dependencies that go along with each package selection with pacman. Also in my limited experience with it, pacman doesn't neccessarily like to uninstall dependencies, although I'm sure it's probably trivial.

As someone else said, it just doesn't give the warm fuzzies that Slack does.

Gotta agree with you there. The Arch community is one of its greatest assets. Lots of people who are very eager to help in a timely fashion. If you have an issue with software that was put into the repos practically hours ago you could probably find comments on it in the forums.