First Distro Tried: Slackware

So a few months before I setup my second drive with Mandrake, I decided to see what was out there. I installed VMWare on my system. Next I installed slackware on the virtual drive. Slackware is one of the oldest gnu/linux distributions that's still going. I was intriqued with what I found when I installed it. I had heard horror stories from the old days of setting up a slack box, but there was no sign of the old school commandline installs with this one. I believe it was Slackware 9.0 if I remember correctly it was the last version that came out before Patrick Volkerding got real sick, and was out of action for quite some time. I was amazed at all the software that was available for free as well. Some of it was quite impressive. I tried Openoffice for the first time and was impressed. I played around with this distribution for about a month before trying the next one. Here are some things I found with it:

1. It is very stable, I never had a crash the whole time I used it.


2. It actually wasn't that hard to install


3. Despite the ease of setup, as a new user figuring out how to install new software was a bit of challenge (One which I took, and figured out in short order)

I should preface this and state I found the installation easy. A person new to computers who has only used windows would probably be intimidated by the partioning step, but for me this was old hat ;-)