Back in the early '90s, if you had an "IBM-compatible personal computer" in your home, it almost certainly was running either DOS or Windows as its operating system. And that was fine for most people, but some of us were enthusiasts, geeks, and nerds. We liked technology. We enjoyed fine-tuning our systems, learning all about them, and programming. And sure, you could tinker some with DOS/Windows, but it was fundamentally a closed system.
For me, the appeal of Slackware (and Linux in general) was that it opened a door to a whole universe of software and source code that was previously inaccessible, as well as the feeling of belonging to a community of like-minded enthusiasts and geeks that loved and worked on it. A free, open-source Unix-like operating system that ran on your PC at home -- how cool was that!? (Spoiler: very!) I'd heard things about how 'powerful' Unix was -- and now I had my very own, and it even came with source code. I was also a believer in the nascent free software movement.
So that's a longwinded way to say yes, all of the above. Community, geeking out over cool new technology, and as a programmer, getting access to a completely open, hackable machine.
Edit: I think at one point there was a Linux distro based on My Little Pony, is that right? It was a different time, you had a new space that had just opened up for creative exploration, and it was accessible mostly to nerds and people on the fringe. There were a lot of weird things coming out back then.
https://distrowatch.com/table-mobile.php?distribution=rebecc...
Slackware uses a BSD-style init system, where you just have one big shell script for booting the system -- you can read through it and edit it, it's all right there, self-contained.
Additionally, all of the old Unix tomes still largely apply to Slackware. That's increasingly, and distressingly, not true of most other distros.
I remember having to re-run the installation many times, from selecting the wrong options during installation.
I think it was SuSE that finally clicked for me.
[1] It was released a few months before Debian so there was no Debian, no Ubuntu, no RedHat etc... these were all distros that mostly started taking off in the to mid- to late-90's. (Ubuntu of course didn't start until early this century) For the very earliest releases of Linux you had to download boot and root floppy images and then piece together what you needed for a working system. Usually this also included recompiling or at least re-linking the kernel... it was that primitive. Then there was this new concept of a Linux 'distribution' with the likes of Slackware that took the pain out of the process and caught on very quickly.
I tried Slackware after hearing the phrase "If you use RedHat, you learn RedHat. If you use Debian, you learn Debian. If you use Slackware, you learn Linux." Also, I had an old computer and very poor internet, so the all-in-one DVD approach appealed to me. I downloaded the Slackbook and got to it, and it patiently taught me what a filesystem was, how boot works, what X was, how to use the terminal, and so on.
Other operating systems took a lot of that for granted! They assumed I had resources, and Slackware would work with pretty well nothing. If Slackware took more time to use, time was all I had! And if Slackware made me learn things to use it properly, it was well worth it! Even now, 14 years later, lots of skills I learned are still useful - bash, the boot process, compiling software, managing dependencies (I once wanted ffmpeg with all dependencies coming from subversion, so I coded up an updater/build manager in 100% shell! Slackware taught me to do that :)
I used it for many years, distro hopping in the background, before eventually migrating to Debian. Life moved on, and I had less time to deal with "how do I build THIS from source?" and I wanted something that would help me out a bit more.
Slackware has given me an appreciation for stability. There is really something big about lasting decades. I can use those things, and also the things I know today, rather than having half the things I knew two years ago going in the bin.
Bit of a ramble. I suppose I have a lot of affection for the distro, it was a formative environment for me.
I learned a lot, I was on AOL at the time so I couldn't figure out certain things like XFree86 or vim since AOL didn't work on Linux. So whenever I was stuck I would literally restart the machine to Windows, go online, look up how to do something, take notes, and restart back to Linux to try what I was doing. It took a long time... But it made me extremely comfortable with the command line, and figure out where Linux breaks since Slackware was such a simple system.
Though I moved on to FreeBSD, then Gentoo, then Debian, and Ubuntu. I still think Slackware was a solid place to start.
I guess it has led me to my current path of running a DevOps consulting company...
On my case, it was offered alongside the Linux Unleashed book series, which on the first edition was shipping Slackware 2.0 with it.
Then as Patrick mentions on the annoucement, they got to be available in Walnut Creek CD-ROM collection, which was the way to get FOSS CDs shipped to your from anywhere in the world.
So you had basically FreeBSD, Slackware, Red-Hat, Debian and Yasdrill (which quickly fade away), Mandrake and SuSE came a bit later.
For me Slackware only lost relevance when Linux distributions adopted the package concept from UNIX clones, thus easing the pain to hunt dependencies with tarballs, or having to use alien to convert them.
I kept subscriptions from Walnut Creek to both FreeBSD and Slackware for about 10 years. They would automatically send me new versions as soon as they were released.
Most of these mainstream distros (except maybe Debian) were starting to go in the direction of trying to become more user friendly. They had graphical installers rather then text based and they had all sorts of new graphical utilities for configuration and made various attempts at trying to automate and sort much of that configuration for you.
Except that they were mostly terrible at that in those early years of these attempts. So the first thing I actually ever tried to install on that laptop was RedHat 9 and I couldn't get my USB DSL modem to work as well as other specific laptop hardware features.
Then some folks I knew were using Slackware and told me to try it and there were guides on how to make that modem work with it so I started using it.
And very quickly I realized that while on Slackware you had to generally do a lot more configuration in text files and through CLI utilities, it generally yielded the results you expected and things didn't magically happen.
Meanwhile in those other distros that were trying to become more user friendly, you had all of these crazy graphical utilities that worked half of the time, sometimes mangled configuration files (the Suse ones were specially amazing at producing completely broken xorg.conf files) or just simply didn't work.
I learned a lot about all of those because as I became more proficient with Linux I kinda became the goto guy in my college for a lot of people who are also new to Linux to help them sort out their Linux setups, specially on laptops.
A few years later Ubuntu came along, kinda trying to do the same thing those other distros were doing but using mostly existing UI utilities (rather than creating new ones) and just made sure they actually worked.
I ended up transitioning to Ubuntu (after a couple of years of Gentoo and Arch) and never looked back until I moved to macs in the early 2010s.
I think RedHat came along in the mid to late 90's. I jumped ship and never looked back, because RPM packages were so much more convenient then Slackware's hodgepodge of configure scripts and makefiles. Ubuntu then came along in the 2000's, around the time that RedHat got bought by IBM and became less cool, and that's been more or less the state of things ever since because Ubuntu-based distros tend to have better hardware detection and support.
IBM bought Red Hat only three years ago.
After I got more used to how things worked, I eventually moved towards Redhat until I finally landed on Debian.
As a primarily Ubuntu user in my time, was part of it that the Linux landscape was much less mature back then? Was it the principals/ ethos that the project stood behind? The community? All of the above? Haha, I’m very curious. I’ve always knew of the distro, but never had a good reason to use it these days. It still clearly has a cult like following, and I don’t know the history of it honestly.