Bah, I just typed a small review of Frugalware, a new distribution based on Slackware, but I lost the text, probably because I hit the maximum session time of my blog system :-( That will learn me to save the text from time to time.
I won’t retype it completely. But to summarize: Frugalware could be an interesting alternative for Slackware fans, as it contains much more packages than Slackware, and is much more actively developed. But for users wanting a nice distribution without too much effort: forget about Frugalware. The installer is extremely cumbersome. It did not give any error message when the installation of the boot loader failed, and when it did, the kernel did not succeed in mounting the root partition in a VMWare system. So actually I never got to test the distribution itself. Oh, and the default software selection is unhandy, and too much things are installed by default (default install includes KDE + Gnome + XFCE + server tools +advanced console tools for experienced users and other things).
If you think Frugalware has a bad installer, try Arch to find a really broken one.
Frugalware’s worked for me, but this distro it’s 10,000% _less_ reliable than Slackware.
Note that I _never_ install a distro in VMware, but only in the real thing.
If you have some time, please share your problems with the developers.