Still extremely customizable, and peerless rolling release features.

You can mix and match stable and bleeding edge packages very easily and switch at any time.

When packages make breaking changes, Gentoo will warn you and guide you through the migration before you update and only if you have the affected package installed.

Not so! General binary support was added quite recently.

I like that more behaves like cat when there’s less than a page of output rather than requiring you to press q to get back to the prompt even when it would just fit.

There’s probably a way to make less do that too, but more already does it without configuration. Overall I use less most of the time but I like having the option.

I’m not complaining; I’m clarifying for less informed readers. It’s a subtle and often misleading distinction.

Calling a license that leads to more proprietary software “even more open source” is absolutely debatable. The only extra restriction is disallowing free software becoming proprietary, which promotes more openness overall.

You’re not wrong by any means, but people should understand the actual tradeoff when considering licenses.

More open strictly in that it allows free software to be rolled up into proprietary software.

A friend gave me the 6-CD “power pack” of Mandrake 10 that could install a quite wide range of optional software completely offline. Hooked me too.

That does sound like a bit much for my daily driver; I’ll have to check it out in a VM sometime. It warms my heart that a distro community can have such longevity, and I think the simplicity has to be a big part of that.

Isn’t the lack of dependency management a huge pain on Slackware? I think Gentoo is my forever distro, but I’m very curious about Slackware.