Slackware is hardly that much manual labor, either. You can grab precompiled tarballs from places like AlienBob and Slacky, or you can use the highly interactive, curses-driven sbopkg frontend to install from SlackBuilds in a way that I find is far more awe-striking than any other package manager I've used, if not necessarily that powerful.
There's still plenty of disinfo about it, though. Which is sad, as it is probably the only sane distro left (besides CRUX and Gentoo, perhaps). Patrick Volkerding really is a genius.
I agree completely, it's not that hard at all. Slackware was my proper introduction to the world of GNU/Linux back in the late 90s, and I always end up going back to it. Before the days of sbopkg, I always installed via ./configure -> make -> make install on the source anyway.
Another bonus of going back to Slack would be avoiding the looming systemd switch in Jessie. I'm still on the fence about it; I'm not a conspiracy nut who thinks it's trying to destroy GNU/Linux, but I don't care for how big it's getting either. So far Pat has been good about staying with a traditional "if it ain't broke don't fix it" approach, which I find comforting. Let the other guys deal with bleeding edge! :)
There's still plenty of disinfo about it, though. Which is sad, as it is probably the only sane distro left (besides CRUX and Gentoo, perhaps). Patrick Volkerding really is a genius.