This was my second Linux distro, after Mandrake. Mandrake showed me that an alternative OS was viable. Slackware (and the trouble it took to get it working) taught me how computers work.
Same here! That first Mandrake boot was magical so different from windows (KDE3) yet so functional. I remember burning my first CD with K3b, that worked perfectly and it was just as functional as the expensive Nero!
Man those were the days, having to manually mount your usb stick with the 2.4 kernel. Dropline Gnome (still alive I see http://www.droplinegnome.org/) made Slackware a lot easier to keep up to date and pretty and slapt-get provided a nice update mechanism. I went to Gentoo afterwards and then to Arch, I haven't looked back for years now. To bad DO dropped Arch support so now I'm using Debian on the server VM's.
Remember Patrick got sick and the whole community was sending drugs? Nice.
And that whole drama about jumping version numbers...
I think about Patrick's illness almost every time I brush my teeth. If I remember right, he got some bacterial infection after swallowing dislodged oral flora, or at least that was the working theory.
