For the past month now, i've been running slackware 14.2 on my laptop. I wanted something that was rock-solid stable and a lightweight system. So far my experiences have been great, and I want to share the good and the bad i've experienced. Just note that a lot of this stuff is probably fixed on -current.

The Good

• A Complete Operating System.
  This is something that drew my attention immediately. I always dismissed slackware since in order to get a good experience, you have to install everything. I thought this was an absolute waste of disk space at first, but then I saw the numbers: A complete install of Slackware with everything is around 10-12GBs. That's smaller than a default install of windows, but you get 20x the functionality. I do have some gripes with the way the Software Sets are organized that I will go over later, but I really like having access to everything out of the box and not having to go to my package manager every couple minutes.

• BSD-like Init System.
  I love how init works on BSD, you use an easy to modify file (Usually rc.conf or rc.local.) to enable and disable daemons, and you can easily create your own if you know shell scripting. Likewise you can put things in rc.local such as commands you want to run at startup. An edge case for me would be: I'm a gamer, and I've recently been playing the entire Elder Scrolls series. Like with most elder scrolls games, mods make them more fun. Unfortunately mods are painful to install due to the case-sensitive nature of Unix filesystems. Because of this, I create an image file that then gets formatted with a case-insensitive JFS. On my workstation which run OpenSUSE, getting systemd to attach the image file to a loop device and then mount said loop device is painful, so painful in fact, I gave up, made a perl script that does it all for me when Xorg starts. Meanwhile on Slackware, I can run the TWO commands that are needed to attach the image to a loop device, and then mount it, all because systemd doesn't (well it does, but it's weird) support running commands at startup. Frustrating. To see that difference, here's the code:
  The Perl Script:

  #!/usr/bin/perl
  
  if ( $#ARGV 0 ) {
      print("Include path to image file.\n");
      print("USAGE: mount-morrowind.pl <path-to-imgfile>\n");
      exit 1;
  }
  my $LOOP_LABEL=`udisksctl info -b /dev/loop0 | awk '/IdLabel/{print \$2}'`;
  chomp($LOOP_LABEL);
  if ( $LOOP_LABEL eq 'Morrowind' ) {
      print("Morrowind Image is mounted.\n");
      exit 0;
  }
  system("udisksctl loop-setup -f $ARGV[0] --no-user-interaction");
  system("udisksctl mount -b /dev/loop0");
  

  rc.local:

  /usr/bin/udisksctl loop-setup -f /path/to/morrowind.img --no-user-interaction
  /bin/mount /dev/loop0 /mnt/morrowind
  

• Slackbuilds
  Kinda like the AUR, in the sense that you can find mostly anything in the Slackbuilds repo. There's even a repo called Slackonly that you can use for packages that take 2 trillion years to compile (Looking at you Qt5).
• Actually Good Graphical Package Manager.
  There's an unofficial package manager called slapt-get, and it has a graphical version called gslapt. I literally have no complains with gslapt, it's searches fast, it searches accurately, it installs packages quickly. It's great.
• LTS
  Many are under the impression that Slackware is dead, but that's not the case, and it still receives security updates, see here. That means it's a distro that has been support for 5 years so far. That's on par with Debian.

The Bad

• Badly Organized Software Sets
  I think that the way the Software Sets are organized is horrible. I firmly believe that Libraries and Applications should be seperated. Instead of having 1 software set that contains Xfce, it should be 2 that has the Libraries in one, and the Applications in the other. This is a minor gripe, but it has led to a lot of headaches when it comes to download packages that need certain libraries but don't have obvious package names.
• Building from source is ass.
  Even though Slackonly has outdated packages compared to what's on the actual Slackbuilds website. I find myself using the Slackonly repo because i'm going to admit it: I hate building from source.
  I'll do it if I have to, but when you're using a 1st gen i5 processor, even some of the simplest software can take FOREVER to build. It's the reason why I never used Crux or Gentoo. While the idea of customizing your software to fullest is nice, I don't want to build my god damn web browser every week, or rebuild the Qt library every update, because it will probably kill my processor in the longrun, and it makes my system unusable. And nothing, and I do mean NOTHING is more frustrating, then building software for 7 hours, only for it to fail and having to start over. Fuck no, I hate source-based packaging.
• Network Manager no workey.
  Not really Slackware's fault, for some reason old versions of Network Manager don't like my wifi card (Intel 7260). It just gets stuck in an infinite loop of connect and reconnecting. Thankfully, using connmand with cmst as a graphical manager works fantastically.
• No MATE Utilities.
  This actually shocked me, no one ever made any slackbuilds for MATE or it's utilities. I love the applications of MATE: Caja (File Manager) and Engrampa (Archive Manager) are amazing programs. I actually made Slackbuilds for them, but unfortunately Slackbuilds.org isn't allowing any new submission =(. I'll probably post them on my git soon though.

And that's all I really have to say about my experience with Slackware so far. I like it a lot and can't wait for Slackware 15 to officially release.

Also, if you're a Slackware user or just someone who admires the project, and aren't aware of this. The creator of Slackware has a Patreon. Go donate there if you want =)