Slackware 11 is Coming
ejd3 writes "In the slackware-current changelog Pat has stated that 'Although there's still quite a bit in the TODO queue here I'm making my steps carefully as -current is very stable, and I think it should ship as a stable 11.0 soon so that we can get back to the business of breaking things in -current. :-)' How much longer will the slackers have to wait?"
Or just install 10.2, then install slapt-get and add your favorite slackware mirror's -current as a source.
There are a couple of slack-based AMD64 systems besides SLAMD64. I liked SLAMD64, but haven't found it as trouble-free as some others apparently have. Frugalware claims to be pretty much Slackware with Pacman bolted on, and I liked it a lot. I also just downloaded something called Bluewhite 64 Linux, another unofficial port. That goes on my testing partition this weekend (replacing STX Linux, another Slackware derivative I was testing for installation on a friend/potential convert's older laptop).
So if Slackware is a niche player now (which I don't believe), then one part of that niche is as a base for new distros -- the excellent Zenwalk (which I run on my laptop), STX, Frugalware, Voltalinux (Slackware with pkgsrc?), Slax and Vector, just off the top of my head. Not as many derivatives as Debian, perhaps, but certainly a healthy number and probably indicative of a healthy distro.
I think Slackware's biggest "problem" is that it has little to no "community," at least as far as vocal fanboys (you know, the kind who visit Distrowatch to click through and drive up its numbers). I think it tends to attract and keep a self-sufficient, quieter crowd, and therefore its presence isn't as great as its numbers, if that makes any sense.
And text, of course. As soon as I boot up and people see text instead of a pretty splash screen I see that sphincter-tightening look come over some of their faces.
But beyond the entertainment value it's probably a bad thing.