 The SLS distribution was not well maintained, so in July 1993 a new distribution, called Slackware and based on SLS, was released by Patrick Volkerding.Also dissatisfied with SLS, Ian Murdock set to create a free distribution by founding Debian, which had its first release in December 1993.Users were attracted to Linux distributions as alternatives to the DOS and Microsoft Windows operating systems on IBM PC compatible computers, Mac OS on the Apple Macintosh, and proprietary versions of Unix.