That 4-7 thing was really kind of funny at the time. There were so many version number purists then … major.minor.patch is the rule, and don’t you dare do anything but! Slackware is sitting there looking at Redhat and Mandrake and going: “what if we release version 7 – maybe we can trick people into switching!” or something.

Well, the t-shirt above is also from an arbitrary version number. Slackware released 13.0, 13.1, 13.2, 13.37 cause it was funny.

Now with git and rolling releases, I think people would be less mad. Hell, even windows 7->8->10 happened.

This is a very fun chart: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Distribution_Timeline.svg – slackware looks very impressive there – the longest lived old distro – and even Suse can (partially) trace its heritage to slackware. But, excluding Suse (and its derivatives), Slackware probably has less than 1% of the linux market share.

Actually, that chart probably explains the current redhat saga – look how many derivatives have spawned over the years! Imagine you could halt that process…