
"
Slackware 14.0 brings many updates and enhancements, among which you'll find two of the most advanced desktop environments available today: Xfce 4.10.0, a fast and lightweight but visually appealing and easy to use desktop environment, and KDE 4.8.5, a recent stable release of the 4.8.x series of the award-winning KDE desktop environment. [...] Slackware uses the 3.2.29 kernel bringing you advanced performance features such as journaling filesystems, SCSI and ATA RAID volume support, SATA support, Software RAID, LVM (the Logical Volume Manager), and encrypted filesystems. Kernel support for X DRI (the Direct Rendering Interface) brings high-speed hardware accelerated 3D graphics to Linux."
Member since:
2009-03-27
Well that's an easy one to answer.
Its appeal lies in its simplicity and predictability, especially in its init scripts and conf files. I can always assume that Slack won't run over my settings.
Also, I know people think the packaging system is a throwback, but I personally prefer Slackware's over any other. Its genius lies not in its packaging format but in the de facto way that packaging works.
First, almost all dev libraries you need are installed by default. If you can't find a certain library or program, you can use slackpkg to autodownload and resolve dependencies. If slackpkg doesn't have it (which is more often than not the case), you can almost always find it in Slackbuilds. Is Slackbuilds too annoying to use? Then use sbopkg, which automates Slackbuilds. Don't want to tarnish the simplicity of your system? Don't use sbopkg. Still can't find things? Compile and install from source without fear of conflicting with your package manager in the future even if you overwrite a file, because Slack's package management is dumb.
Of course, another way to read all these "advantages" is to say that in a world where the Linux desktop still stinks, Slackware gets out of your way the most so that you can mop up the mess more easily once it happens (and it eventually will)...