Well, I gave it a shot and I just couldn’t do it. Slackware’s install was familiar to me, but it has not really gone through much improvement since I last used it (8 years ago?).
The security was excellent – nothing turned on by default, and base configurations for anything that was already on. This leaves a lot of power to the administrator to make sure they have the server configured exactly as they want, and nothing more.
The kernel was a bit fat but I cleaned that up (and learned a lot about the new kernels in the process). However, the base set of modules did not have support for my wireless card (Broadcom B43), so that was a bit of a pain.
There is also not a decent package manager on slackware and I found myself at a slackware package site that takes other packages and converts them for use with the pkgtools set of utilities. For productivity and usability this was a major buzz kill.
I also had a difficult time getting apache and php to play nicely together. Again, productivity buzzkill for a developer laptop.
As a server I still think slackware holds its own. However, if they do not take the time to update the package management system a bit, this will quickly change in favor of distributions such as Gentoo and SuSE. Even Redhat with their Fedora and CentOS server platforms are moving ahead of Slackware in the game.
I can still see Slackware being used a lot in embedded systems also. It is so lean in the beginning that it’s hard not to think embedded when you first install it!
So that it. Slackware has been removed and I’m currently in the process of installing Debian for the next part in this series.