some people shit on #slackware shortcomings, not realizing that the whole distribution is the work of almost only patrick volkerding plus a handful of people contributing in their spare time. the biggest snobs are in the openbsd & arch communities from my experience. not everyone of course, and arch & openbsd are fine projects.

slackware sure has some rough edges, but is simple enough if you don't need someone holding your hand and gets security fixes for an amazing long time by todays standards. slackware 14.0, released 2012 still gets fixes.

most other things have big sponsors behind them.

openbsd had >100k in 2019, arch has also multiple companies sponsoring.

patrick gets ~$2000 monthly from people on patreon.