LinuxQuestions Users Choose Their Favorite Distro: Slackware (zdnet.com)

ZDNet summarizes some of the surprises in this year's poll on LinuxQuestions, "one of the largest Linux groups with 550,000 member". An anonymous reader quotes their report: The winner for the most popular desktop distribution? Slackware...! Yes, one of the oldest of Linux distributions won with just over 16% of the vote. If that sounds a little odd, it is. On DistroWatch, a site that covers Linux distributions like paint, the top Linux desktop distros are Mint, Debian, Ubuntu, openSUSE, and Manjaro. Slackware comes in 28th place... With more than double the votes for any category, it appears there was vote-stuffing by Slackware fans... The mobile operating system race was a runaway for Android, with over 68% of the vote. Second place went to CyanogenMod, an Android clone, which recently went out of business...

Linux users love to debate about desktop environments. KDE Plasma Desktop took first by a hair's breadth over the popular lightweight Xfce desktop. Other well-regarded desktop environments, such as Cinnamon and MATE, got surprisingly few votes. The once popular GNOME still hasn't recovered from the blowback from its disliked design change from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3.

Firefox may struggle as a web browser in the larger world, but on Linux it's still popular. Firefox took first place with 51.7 percent of the vote. Chrome came in a distant second place, with the rest of the vote being divided between a multitude of obscure browsers.
LibreOffice won a whopping 89.6% of the vote for "best office suite" -- and Vim beat Emacs.

Comments

Re: Slackware.....

[Anonymous Coward]

LinuxQuestions is a pretty Slackware-centric site. IIRC the Slackware docs say to go to LinuxQuestions for Slackware support. That may have changed since I last used Slackware, but I suspect that's the explanation.

Re:So?

[ledow]

Red Hat gave us RPMs,systemd and NetworkManager. If I was drawing up a kill-list for a Linux distro, those would be at the top.

Outside of their high-end enterprise stuff and the kernel itself, they don't really touch that much. I'm a network manager and have deployed and managed Linux systems, and still do (VMs make this much easier nowadays, alongside the traditional MS setup). I've never once touched Red Hat as a distro for that purpose.

But I've bought any number of Slackware DVDs. Just the fact that Slackware is clean upstream code and simple patches for the most part, rather than highly customised stuff to make it work for The One True Distro gets my money.

I'm sure they do invest and they have a lot of code spread around, but they clearly aren't after my money. They just want huge businesses and not smaller shops at all. The pricing alone tells you that.

But Slackware? I've bought CD's almost every year (that are basically useless as soon as they've published because they are out-of-date and I never use physical media anyway), and the amount of work that goes into making it *my* OS is what I'm rewarding.

Red Hat don't have a penny of my money, in comparison.

Re:Slackware just worked on my laptop

[Anonymous Coward]

Slackware is scorching fast compared to pretty much any other Linux distro and the only thing that is simpler than Slackware is probably OpenBSD.

Its not vote stuffing

[mnmn]

I'm an example in this sample where I run loads of rpm-based and deb-based distros at work and at home. I might have one single VM with slackware running which I do not use much, but slackware's easily my favorite distro.

Slackware is what weaned us into Linux two decades ago (Infomagic CDs). Slackware was easy to open and understand every layer of the OS, and even make packages for. It's also 'cleaner' for purists and still comes with sysv init system. If you're considering installbase as being equal to favorite distro, you're disregarding the enormous goodwill slackware still has from people who hardly use it anymore.