RE: [TCLUG:5603] RedHat 6 vs Caldera 2.2

[Luke Francl <fran0382@tc.umn.edu>]

On Thu, 29 Apr 1999, Brady Hegberg wrote:

> Just curious:
> 
> I've noticed that Slackware has been losing mindshare to Debian 
> lately.  I've also seen that recently people have stopped even mentioning 
> Slackware when they list distros.  Does anybody have speculation on why 
> this is?  I've heard and read that Slackware doesn't seem to be trying to 
> keep up with the latest changes (glibc, 2.2.x kernel etc) or at least 
> waiting longer than the other distros to impliment them.  I can see how 
> this could be a good thing in a way...obviously people running servers 
> don't necessarily want to upgrade to the latest, potentially unstable 
> releases...but on the other hand...
> 
> Wondering what other people have to say about this.

Personally, I love Slackware, but I've never used Debian. I'd like to try
it out someday, because it seems to have some features that sound really
nice, but without the RedHat kludge (which I have used and was not very
pleased with). Slackware has sort of fallen off the map lately, but it's
still heavily used by "old-time" linux users (not that I am!) because it
was one of the first. I like Slackware for it's BSD-ish approach to the
system; if Debian was more SysV-ish, I doubt I would like it...

I think one of the main reasons that Slackware mindshare has fallen is
first of all, no big corporate interest. While there is a slackware.com
domain, there really isn't a big company like RedHat or Caldera to back
the distro up (I mean, does anyone actually *use* Caldera OpenLinux?).
That doesn't really explain Debian being more popular, though. Maybe there
are some third-party statistics about this someplace?

As for 2.2.x and glibc, Slackware 4.0 is going to use those -- along with
KDE, which surprised me, given the distro's reputation as the "geek's"
Linux. I would have figured they'd used Gnome; on the other hand, KDE
actually *works* so... Not sure when 4.0 is due out. Or if I'm going to
upgrade. I'm pretty happy with 3.6 and an updated kernel...I am curious to
see if they've updated the slackware install, which while pretty good
right now, is a little bit harder than RedHat's just from having more
steps...you have to know a bit more about your computer to do it. Not that
that's a *bad* thing... ;)

Just my thoughts,

Luke