Slackware is the most stripped down and UNIX-like of Linux distributions and is designed to be a workhorse for developers or sysadmins, who do not want "to be met with GUI greeters, setup wizards, beginner-oriented defaults, and enabled-by-default automatic updates." What you get from Slackware is a clean system that expects more of the user, at the command line and in the configuration process. There are virtues to this approach. As Patrick Volkerding, the guiding light of Slackware, sees it: "I think the more you try to second guess the user, the more you put up barriers. So we like to keep things uncomplicated as much as possible." Slackware isn't for everyone, and will never win the race for the Linux desktop, where fancy gizmos, music players, office suites and games are at a premium, but works for users who want "a system that makes a good server - where you aren't even required to install X if you don't want it - or a good desktop workstation if you do a full installation with KDE" or Xfce or Fvwm or Windowmaker or Fluxbox. The masters of Slack Slackware doesn't have a picturesque, simple-choice, resource-hogging GUI installer, but for all that, many would argue that Slackware is just as easy to install, that the installer has more clarity than most, is more flexible, and that it is easier to customise a Slackware installation for the precise requirements of more advanced users and system administrators.

The Slackware user would claim that other distributions will install superfluous packages and tools that have to be removed after the installation is complete. Slackware, more than most Linux distributions, has a feel that is similar to a commercial Unix, and feels like home to the experienced Unix user, in installation and in practice. The asset most valued by the Slack user, and most often claimed for Slackware Linux, is system stability. If you install Slackware on a backroom server you expect it to stay there, and be unnoticed. Slackware is for developers and sysadmins, for those who want to become masters of their own domain, and those who want to understand how their system works. As the anonymous coward once said "if you use Ubuntu, you'll learn Ubuntu. If you use Slackware, you'll learn Linux," and there are Slackware derivatives, Vector Linux or Zenwalk, for other kinds of users. The stripped-down cleanliness and utilitarian straightforwardness of Slackware Linux may explain why there is still an extensive user base of loyal and trusting Slack users, despite its lack of apparent commercial appeal. Other distributions may come with a greater range of options but Slackware comes with all the tools that are essential to run a clean system in a production environment, as a server or as a development platform. You don't need the latest and greatest music software to run Apache or Samba. In the world of Slackware less is often more. Soft landings for Linux users Slackware has been around since the early nineties, before the Linux kernel reached its first point release, when Patrick Volkerding, the one and only maintainer of Slackware Linux, cleaned up a version of SLS, (SoftLanding Linux Systems) for his professor at MSU (Michigan State University) to use in teaching LISP. SLS was the earliest popular distribution of Linux, but had its problems. In the Debian Manifesto, Ian Murdock, the founder of Debian, was moved to say of SLS: "It is quite possibly the most bug-ridden and badly maintained Linux distribution available; unfortunately, it is also quite possibly the most popular."

SLS was a compilation of the latest software available, but wasn't always usable straight out of the box. Slackware went some way to addressing this problem, by ensuring that the packages included in a distribution were not just the latest and greatest, but the best available, and "adding a feature that installed important packages like the shared libraries and the kernel image automatically." The first release of Volkerding's reworking of SLS was distributed on ftp and announced with a post entitled "Anyone want an SLS-like 0.99pl11A system?", and Slackware rapidly gained a reputation that has stayed with it, for stability and lack of bloat. The good names were taken Slackware owed its self-deprecating name to Volkerding's obsessions. The name wasn't chosen to win over the buyers and sellers of hardware systems. Volkerding was a fan of the satirical Church of the Subgenious and a Deadhead, a follower of the Grateful Dead, who had an ethos not unlike the hacker cultures of that gave rise to Linux and free software, allowed and encouraged their fans to record and share tapes of their concerts, and eschewed the trappings of commercial success. Deadheads formed one of the earliest net communities around the bulletin boards of Stewart Brand's well.com in the 1980s. John Perry Barlow, one of the Grateful Dead songwriters, went on to found the Electronic Frontier Foundation and wrote an essay called The Economy of Ideas, subtitled "a framework for patents and copyrights in the Digital Age", which could be seen as an early manifesto for the culture of sharing ideas, software and music across the Web, a culture which the nascent Linux and hacker communities were fully plugged into. Slackware took its name from the mythical J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, the charismatic leader and figurehead of the Church of the Subgenius, whose message to the peoples of America was to "Get Slack".