> Slackware unfortunately lost out to the modern world. But heroic effort by Patrick.

I dunno man, a lot of people still use it! Been on it every day about 4 years now, there's a modern ARM port in development, so it might not end up going away for a long time.

That Slackware is difficult to use on the level of Gentoo or LFS I think is mostly a meme and an overstatement; it's just very old-school. It has a nice installer and a good wiki.

Many of the gripes that I hear of managing other linux systems I seldom or never have experienced on Slackware. It doesn't get in your way or flippantly change things from one release to the next. It's a rock-solid choice.

The funny thing is that a lot of us older people started with Slackware back in the late 1990's, only because early Debian and Redhat builds on the Infomagic CD's were too broken to install or run reliably. Slackware 2.0 was pretty rock solid by comparison and installed out of the box on most PC hardware I could find at the time.