Slackware

Raised as a usability problem by 10 people on Hacker News over 16 years (2010–2025), in 10 threads.

People raised many different problems with Slackware, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 10 complaints

Users must recompile the bloated kernel to remove unneeded drivers, taking hours2025-11-06
Text is unreadable on mobile, even in reader mode2022-02-04
Installer wouldn't run in 4MB RAM, forcing manual partitioning and mkswap from the command line2021-07-20
Packages sometimes need manual work to function out of the box2021-04-30
Kernel upgrade is a multistep process the user couldn't complete; no easy upgrade path2020-07-10
Installer bug makes it impossible to install Slackware on NVMe drives2019-06-28
Slackware is harder to set up and keep current than Arch2016-03-18
Lacks dependency tracking, so installing and updating packages is painful2013-11-08
Slackware is difficult to set up and manage dependencies without modern package manager2011-12-15
Updating to a new release is not as easy as other distros2010-05-25