I would look at it from a marketing perspective.  Each of the
distros you cited are backed by a company.  I believe Slack is
supported only by Patrick V.  Also, look at the market share.
Red Hat has 55-60% market share, Caldera 10%, and all others 
are less that that.  Caldera and Mandrake are Red Hat spin-offs.
So what it comes down to is how much effort is a company willing
to spend on a distro (Slack) that has under 5% market share?
Anyone willing to use Slack or Debian presumable knows enough
to get it to work anyway, so they really don't need to support
it.

Looking at it another way, knowing that Netscape has under 20%
market share, more and more web sites are being designed to work
only with I.E.  Why?  The effort to appease the 15-20% is not
worth the effort.  That thought is more valid with only 5%
market share.

Of course, some will say that 5% is worth going after.  Loki
thought so, that's why we have some games.  Linux on the 
desktop is about 5% market share - Windows taking up the 
other 95%.

George


Rick Rosinski wrote:
> 
> Over time, I have noticed (as did everybody else, no doubt) that when
> checking for compatibility / requirements for most of the software out there
> (Notably, StarOffice), they support RedHat, SuSE, Debian, Mandrake, and even
> YellowDog, and of course, Solaris.  But they do not support Slackware, even
> though they provide a tarball binary (so it isn't because of any package
> management).  This really irritates me, and I worry about future releases of
> my programs will no longer work on a Slackware system.  I don't want to have
> to change to one of the above distributions just because of some major
> oversight of one of the first - and ongoing - distributions of Linux.
> 
> Any comments, rants, verifications, discredits, etc.?
> 
> --
> Rick Rosinski
> http://rickrosinski.com
> rick@rickrosinski.com
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