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Is Slackware Fading Away?
A reader writes "I just read over on userlocal.com about how David Cantrell announced he is no longer actively developing protopkg and autoslack (these are 2 apps that could have brought slack out of the stoneage but still kept to slacks philosophy of K.I.S.S.). So is it almost "game over" for the first commercial linux distribution which used to be the heavyweight champ?"
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Linux community when last month IDC confirmed that Linux accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that Linux has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Linux is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Linux's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Slackware faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Linux because Linux is dying. Things are looking very bad for Linux. As many of us are already aware, Linux continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. Slackware is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
RedHat leader Matthew Szulik states that there are 7000 users of Redhat. How many users of Slackware are there? Let's see. The number of Redhat versus Slackware posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Slackware users.
All major surveys show that Slackware has steadily declined in market share. Slackware is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Slackware is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. Slackware continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Slackware is dead.
Slackware is dying
Uh if you know what you are doing with RedHat you could have done that. In Redhat you can select from individual packages. I think 300M would have been emough, to install the very minimul toolset.
Only 'flamers' flame!