I ran Slackware many moons ago. It was very bare bones and it took a lot of work, but I was young and it was an immersive experience. As another commenter wrote, people on IRC played up how 1337 they were for running Slack. I disagree slightly with that statement. I spent a lot of time building my Slack system on a PII 266, and I was 12, so it took me a long time with a lot of false starts. I don't think anyone was trying to be "1337", they were just proud of what they'd accomplished. I know I was.

In any event, it's cool to see Slack is still around. I installed ArchLinux on my MBP a couple weeks back. After installing Mavericks, the modified EFI partition I created no longer lets me boot Arch, so I think I'll give Slack a try. It's the challenge that makes it worth it.

Also, I have to strongly suggest to anyone who is not all that into Linux but is interested in learning: Skip the window environment. Force yourself to just sit there on the command line. It's surprising the kind of focus you have when you can't be distracted by all manner of visual eye candy. I know that sounds ridiculous, but it was a real pleasure to use only the CLI. It's sort of like the difference between writing with sidewalk chalk and a fine fountain pen. You find yourself writing /differently/. It's a subtle change with lots of unintended consequences that cause you to think about your work from a different perspective. As Alan Kay put it: Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.