While I think your article is ok, there is a glaring error in your description of Slackware.
Slackware was not the first distribution by any stretch of the imagination. Slackware was predated by many distributions, including the MCC (Manchester Computing Center) distribution, SLS (Softlanding Systems) distribution, and the TAMU (Texas A&M) distributions, just to name a few. In fact, some people claimed at the time of it's initial release that the name Slackware came from the fact that it was designed to pick up the "slack" where SLS left off. I know this because I have been using Linux since the 0.11 kernel release, when all that was distributed was a boot and a root floppy and you had to build the rest yourself. In fact, one distribution I used as the time was HJ Lu's mini distro, which you had to install manually (ie. no fancy installation script) and once installed, build everything not included with the distro (which included just enough of a development system to build the rest).
While Slackware was an early distribution, it wasn't the first.
You're right. I should have said oldest "active" distribution. Having attended TAMU, myself, I knew that one came out very early. Sorry for the omission.
This is a shameless plug for a new distro released by my company, Isaac & Young Computer Company. http://www.iycc.net The distro is called IYCC. It's a Debian-based fork of Ubuntu and will gradually migrate towards importing packages directly from Debian. We created the IYCC Distro to support the computers we manufacture, but others will find it useful as well.
We believe that the out-of-the-box desktop experience of our computers is better than any other computer with any other operating system in the world, without exaggeration.
The best desktop experience is gained by installing the cuadrado-gnome-desktop, if you have an ATI graphics card that can run compiz effects and a widescreen LCD.
If you find bugs or have suggestions for improvement, please let us know at http://bugs.iycc.net.
Debian tops it all, second Knoppix, Opensuse third and the other giant-wannabes follow the lead. I have downloaded & tested out almost all the versions listed above and none have the number of software packages knoppix has. Its hardware detection is unbeatable, just try out Knoppix 5.31 DVD or better Knoppix 6.2 DVD.
For Debian its quite a hectic downloading all the 4 or 5 DVDs just to get all the softwares but all the same its good.
