A first sight review of Slackware 9.0

We talk of the good, bad and the ugly and with the distro wars on the usenet getting fiercer with every new distro, each offering seeks to creates its own niche and gain its own fifteen minutes of fame. "Simplicity is divine"; and these words dont hold much truer for any distro other than Slackware. I have sometimes sat down to try and figure out what gives Slack, its dedicated fan following or what makes Patrick Volkerding a demi-god despite the fact that there is no state of the art package mangement system like RPM or DEB....no hint of visual coherence across desktop environments...no fancy front-ends for administration...no bloated office suites to play with. And all these questions can be answered in one word ---"Simplicity". Perhaps that is the single most important factor that makes people care and in turn make Slackware 9, one of the standout distros of early 2003.