Slackware Linux - Less is more

And this is where Slackware came into its own. Slack was the original under-the-radar Linux, downloaded or purchased from Walnut Creek, and put into service by frustrated sysadmins behind the backs of managers - and during the early to mid-nineties was by far the best known and popular version of Linux among computer professionals and nerds, running print and file and web services on countless backroom servers.

The hegemony of Slack lasted well into the late nineties, before it was overtaken by the more commercial distributions of the time, Red Hat and SuSE, and Mandrake Linux - which later metamorphosed into Mandriva - but although Slack has disappeared off the radar of many Linux users, the distribution is still alive and thriving in the server room and on the workstations of many dedicated Slack users.

Volkerding still largely runs Slack as a one man operation. This has its drawbacks and its virtues. Packages are only updated if they require little or no tweaking to raise their performance, and some, such as GNOME, have been dropped, because they require too much configuration.

Other mainstream distributions spend thousands of hours improving and updating packages and features. Necessity ensures that Volkerding works as much as possible from unmodified sources and Slackware customisation is minimal, with the corollary that Slack creates less support issues for upstream package maintainers.

Slack users would argue that simplicity is its own reward. Slackware is minimalist and transparent and works as the user wants it to work, which from a Slack user's point of view, is as it should be.

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