Nah, I'm not a dual boot kinda guy. Each will have their own home. I'm thinking OpenBSD on the desktop, Slackware on the laptop.

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SOHO?

"Not to your (or my) liking" /= "primitive"

Sounds good to me!

SOHO

Even for that you need at least a third party provided libreoffice. I like how Calligra looks but I am not even able to reliably track my mortgage using its Sheets

Cheers

Hey, just a dang minute there: I'm in the middle of nowhere and have a pretty nice SOHO setup, even have communication to the outside world via satellite. Surrounded by a couple of thousand books, coffee pot about fifteen steps away in the kitchen, Labrador puppy keeping me awake. Servers on shelves in the closet next to me, UPS keep everything going when a tree falls in the forest outside -- yes, when a tree falls and nobody's around it does make a noise (the UPS alarm goes and there's a lot of swearing from houses up and down the line).

Cube farm? Nevermore, Lenore. Drive 15 or 20 miles to the office? Oh, no, never again. Life in the Dilbert Zone? Ho, Ho, Ho, hell no.

Desktop: Xfce, Firefox, Thunderbird, Soffice (OpenOffice), rarely VirtualBox, frequently Terminal. What the heck else do you need? Phone works fine, Skype does too. Eye candy, Eye shmandy.

Software for the stuff I do, sure -- GMT, DSpace, few others. Roll my own, sure: I have been and still am a developer.

I don't like screwing around with computers, got over that decades ago, I want stability and reliability and I've got that with Slackware. Primitive my butt.

Happy camper in the north woods.

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If you you want to track your mortgage in default Slackware, there is sc. As I started with VisiCalc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc, it is not a huge jump.

As for KDE, I do not run it routinely, but do appreciate access to KDE apps such as k3b, okular, ark and karbon on occasion. Other family members find KDE to be a very familiar desktop environment.

I *really* like this statement. I've been distro-hopping since 2002. Slackware is it for me on all of my machines(one OpenBSD partition).
Slackware is rock-steady; it meets my needs.

Haven't you just proven ivandi's point with telling us which third party software that is not part of the standard installation you have installed on your system to get your "pretty nice SOHO"?
AFAIK, neither OpenOffice, Virtualbox nor Skype are in Slackware's repository.

No he didn't. In fact for Slackware there is no "standard installation" but a "base installation" (usually called the "full installation") that each of us expands and customize to his of her liking. Let me remind you what Patrick wrote not that long ago in this post: PS Ivandi wrote :This is plain wrong in my opinion. On the contrary Slackware is probably one of the most versatile Linux distributions, that you can adapt to pretty mach any use case[1]. Yes, that needs some configuration work, but all base components are there.

[1]Slackware is probably not the best fit for the deployment of hundreds of machines in a corporate environment, as it is today.

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They don't need to be in my opinion. The good people at Slackbuilds.org provide build scripts for a wide variety of third party applications. Also our core team developers (Robby and Eric) provide trusted packages on their sites.

Well, I don't really think so. I wouldn't really want those in the distribution software if for no other reason that they'd be out of date (most likely) shortly after the disks are manufactured and I do full installs and don't need any of that stuff on data base servers that sit in the closet mumbling to themselves. I do run MariaDB and PostgreSQL (also not on the distribution, PostgreSQL). DSpace isn't on any distribution I know of (and probably should not be simply because of all the software that needs to be installed; e.g., Java, Tomcat, Ant and others. I have a need, it's highly unlikely that anybody else or at least few other folks would need or want it.

I don't mind installing Oracle Java (OpenJava does not work correctly with some software I have) and either of those aren't distributed; most folks have no need of it.

The only reason I have Oracle VirtualBox is that I must be able to deal with Windows for a couple of clients. Otherwise, I wouldn't bother with it (and I suspect that's true of a whole lot of folks).

I got Skype because HughesNet opened up telephony on the satellite service and I need to talk to people outside of the USA, sometimes for quite a while and, well, it's cheaper than unlimited calling on any telecom I know of. I don't want to bill customers for telephone calls (other than my time), so I installed Skype and there it is. And I don't think it belongs in the distribution either.

If you have a need for something, you can get it and it's easy enough to build, install and configure (and keep up to date, too).

I want the operating system to be complete when I install it (Slackware is). Applications are another matter and are readily available from vendor sources (like Apache for all their software, now including OpenOffice), Java from Oracle, VirtualBox from Oracle, PostgreSQL from SlackBuilds.org and so on.

Not a big burden.

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Then he has missed his own goals. Having a bunch of text editors, WMs and DEs is far from delivering only the essentials that everyone would miss (especially in regards to how many would like to see Slackware get rid of KDE in that other thread). Note that I don't think that Slackware as it is is bad somehow, it is just that it doesn't comply with the quoted text. Maybe that goal has shifted over time, nothing wrong with that, but that doesn't change the fact that a default Slackware install is IMHO lacking certain software that is widely used. Would be interesting to know how many Slackware users (in percent) use a third party office suite, for example, to see if this might be a package that is one of the "essentials that everyone would miss".
I wouldn't mind configuration work, that has to be done on any distribution. But having to go to an unofficial repository (yes, Alien Bob's repositories are not official Slackware repositories) or build a package from source just to get a decent office suite is far from just adapting and having the base components there.
So I tend to disagree here and agree with ivandi that a default Slackware install is somewhat lacking in comparison to other distributions.

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@TobiSGD: So let's continue to disagree on that topic then. Fortunately every one is entitled to one's opinion, so that won't hurt us.

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It's not just what can be added, it's also what can be taken out.

Slackware can be stripped almost bare and still have a functional core.

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I have never installed any operating system for day-to-day use in which I did not install additional software beyond what was included by default.

Nada. Zilch. None.

Because some (and I am one) choose to install additional software in my day-to-day usage Slackware installs is not in any way a valid criticism of Slackware.

At most, it's a commentary on individual users' preferences.

For example, I don't like the Calligra Office Suite. I dislike the interface so much that I've never used it to produce a document. That doesn't mean Slackware is somehow at fault for not installing LibreOffice by default. It means I don't like Calligra's interface, nothing more. If I choose to use something else, that's on me, not Pat.

As an aside, one of the things I have come really to appreciate about Slackware is that it contains by default all you need to compile from sources. Most distros do not--they lack the compilers or they lack the kernel headers or they lack both. I submit that a Linux distro that requires installing additional packages so as to compile from sources is not a complete Linux distro, even if it does include LibreOffice.

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