<groan!> I just wanted to make some positive statements about an often-ignored distro. I have no desire to engage in some pointless flame -war..... Craig Box wrote:
I am interested to know what particular aspect of Slackware makes it more inherently stable than any other distribution built using the same components?
Perhaps you should direct that question to Patrick Volkerding. A rough indication of "stability" might be guaged from the quantity and frequency of patches since each release: Compare the deluge from Mandriva and Fedora with that of Slackware. My conclusion is that quality control takes second place to the pursuit of bleeding edge features in Mandriva and Fedora. Apart from this, I can only offer some observations based on my own experiences.... My own machines, running Slackware, work just fine. One of the reasons that I don't post to this list is that I don't have any problems with Slackware. It just goes! I also have installed Linux on quite a few of the computers of elderly friends. Initially, I thought that Mandrake (as it was called then) would be the most suitable for these newbies. I was wrong. One of the "advantages" of Mandrake was the pretty GUI-based configuration. _None_ of my friends were prepared to configure their own machines: As I ended up doing it anyway, the GUI was of no use to me. Another "advantage" was supposed to be the ease of updating: When my friends saw how long they would have to have their dial-up modem tied up with even the bug-fixes and security-fixes, they baulked. "Stability" problems with Mandrake included crashes, locking up at the point that X started, erratic shutdowns and mounting of CD. I have since replaced all but one of the Mandrake installations with Slackware. All the above problems disappeared. It is a case of configure it once with Slackware and that's it. So far, I have _never_ had to call back to any of my friends to fix a fault directly related to the core Slackware installation. I believe that unstable software (or hardware) will really discourage newcomers far more than a the absence of a couple of flashy GUI-based tools. That is why I recommend Slackware. I concede that there are other very stable distros out there. When you apply the constraints of limited memory and HD space the field thins out quite a bit. I am not familiar enough with these other distros to comment, so I won't. regards, ********************************************* Dr Denise J. Bates, School of Geography & Environmental Science University of Auckland Private Bag 92019, Auckland New Zealand E-mail: d.bates(a)auckland.ac.nz Telephone 09-3737599 ext 86592 *********************************************