Slackware 14.2 Beta Released, Now Uses PulseAudio

[ParisStaltic]

It never ceases to amaze me how many people come out of the woodwork to talk smack about Slack when they obviously haven't used it in 10 years, if ever. All these people simply have faith that New==Improved. Slackware has been my main system since 2000 but it isn't as if I've had blinders on. I routinely and thoroughly test distros for months at a time all the way from the big dogs - Arch, Debian, Centos, Ubuntu, SuSe - to more obscure - bhodi, kali, SolydXK, etc. I can say from experience that Slackware is still my main because it has earned it and keeps on earning it. I spend far less time working ON my system than WITH it because it requires so little maintenance. My system is NEVER at risk. The very worst that can happen is a newly installed app won't run and that is incredibly easy to troubleshoot because my system does NOTHING behind my back. Anything affecting a problem will be in the logs or recent memory exactly because I did it. Being truly vanilla is a huge advantage and though it is possible in other distros that automate dependency resolving to turn that "feature" off, it is not the same because in order to ven have that "feature" a distro has to jump thru hoops to make it work which means altering away from Vanilla. One example is that there is no need nor advantage whatsoever to apply any patches to new kernels direct from kernel.org or any other application. It just works.

Now that there is a real Slackware Live edition see HERE - http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/slackware-live-edition/ -- there is no longer any need for anyone with a brain to talk out some nether orifice. Slackware IS modern - as modern as it needs to be - and Fast, and Stable, and ultra Reliable. If th glimpse from Live piques your interest just set aside 20GB of space to do the Recommended Full Install (most dependencies already provided and screened to be compatible to a fine, smooth, integrated whole) and see for yourself. I'm betting most of you haters will be greatly surprised. Not only is documentation and activity excellent but Linux Questions Network, a HUGE forum with some 30+ specific distro subforums and hundreds of other specific sub-categories is hosted by Slackware and Patrick and other Team Slackware devs as well as independents post there regularly. how many distros have that going for them?

Those of you uninterested can continue with your committee designed new and improved distros that require weekly attention just to stay running and by all means, stay uninformed trolls talking out your butts.

[unixfan2001]

Oh, if you dare to think you're UI/UX expert, I've got rather interesting challenge for you. Dare to design UI for ffmpeg and ALL ITS FEATUERS?

Please, for the love of Schrodinger's Cat, don't dare me anymore. I'm absolutely sick of reading your "daring challenges" only to be smacked by one of your fanboys when I reply in kind.

Furthermore, please read my previous reply to schmatzler, where I already explained what I mean by user interfaces.

Seriously, sometimes you WANT swiss army knife of media processing and various ppl could actually NEED most of these options.

I would imagine something like a fully speech driven user experience ("Convert this!", "Play that!") could be interesting. In terms of simple text input, a sort of tailormade autocompletion wouldn't be bad, coupled with small guide/helper tools for the most basic operations.

[SystemCrasher]

Not going to get into the systemd stuff. If it was a tool need by a slacker learn what a Slacker is

Uhm, sorry for trolling, but since it is really hard to find alive slackers these days, I'm tempted to say "Slackers are extinct species" in this place. At the end of day it seems most people are fond of automating things and offloading routine tasks on machines.

As for boot time:
1) Because I do embedded designs and the faster it up the better. Most of time I prefer just Debian. Because it good on legal stuff, they have sane, production-friendly policies and I can get it right. Not to mention repos with ~50 000 packages, giving me truly infinite world of possibilities.
2) I also hate waiting for machines. Let machines wait me instead. I dislike slow computers. I always seeking to speed things up. Maybe 'coz my 1st computer "booted" in no time. Hit reset - boom - you're in ROM monitor environment already, ready to rock-n-roll. There is no notion of boot time, you power it up and immediately get interactive prompt. Isn't it cool?
3) There're far more than just boot speed. Boot speed is just side effect of logical, sound design which does things right way. And if you want to compare slackware and Kubuntu startup times, you have to at least make sure you launch equal amount of stuff. I doubt you've did it. And if you didn't exactly that, you've benchmarked ... someting else.

Also, if I'm not fond of system boot speed, systemd got smartass systemd-analyze tool. It would explain me what system has been doing and what took it so long. It makes boot time reduction far easier task. Same goes for troubleshooting errors, supervising processes, starting processes right way, etc. Good luck to supervise service start timeout by using scripts, and have fun making sure it not randomly backfires when e.g. NTP adjusts clocks, etc.

[SystemCrasher]

That's not how userfacing design is supposed to work.

Oh, if you dare to think you're UI/UX expert, I've got rather interesting challenge for you. Dare to design UI for ffmpeg and ALL ITS FEATUERS? Seriously, sometimes you WANT swiss army knife of media processing and various ppl could actually NEED most of these options.

In this place I'm getting to think command line interface is a viable option. Furhermore, commandline interface is easy to automate, you can stack various programs and so on. Unix way is all about it. Sure, some things are better in GUI. But some thinsg are better in consoles. These worlds do not exclude each other. Its more fun to get best of both worlds :P.

[unixfan2001]

Not everything has to have fancy GUI's to just work. One example is youtube-dl. A simple command line program to download YouTube videos. You enter the command followed by the URL, done.

You can also use a package manager to install a GUI that is doing the same thing, but you have to press buttons in this GUI and it will take much longer to do the same task.

If you can't understand that not the whole world has one usecase (which is a dumbed down GUI) good luck in the IT world, futurewise. I prefer to be open-minded to different aspects of technology. Also, a good README can spare yourself a lot of time that you otherwise would spend hunting for help on forums or chats.

I didn't talk about GUIs. I talked about user interfaces. You can have non-graphical user interfaces too. The best way to build them isn't pointing users towards a couple of READMEs though. User problems should be solved graciously, without forcing the user to drop out of the experience.

And thanks. I think I'll have a plenty bright future in the industry. In fact, I'm less than a year away from my next promotion.

[schmatzler]

Good design doesn't require any ReadMe files. It provides an interface that is intuitive enough for even the most inept user to immediately grasp it.

Not everything has to have fancy GUI's to just work. One example is youtube-dl. A simple command line program to download YouTube videos. You enter the command followed by the URL, done.

You can also use a package manager to install a GUI that is doing the same thing, but you have to press buttons in this GUI and it will take much longer to do the same task.

If you can't understand that not the whole world has one usecase (which is a dumbed down GUI) good luck in the IT world, futurewise. I prefer to be open-minded to different aspects of technology. Also, a good README can spare yourself a lot of time that you otherwise would spend hunting for help on forums or chats.

[unixfan2001]

Actually slackware is very well documented and understands this. It expexts you to read the the ReadMe. That is why on some of my projects I put a DoNotReadMe because they always will read it then read the readme. So what you is say correct and slackware backs that up with full documentation on every install. README.

That's not how userfacing design is supposed to work. Shipping with dozens of ReadMes doesn't acknowledge the user's shortcomings, it assumes the user is a geek.
Good design doesn't require any ReadMe files. It provides an interface that is intuitive enough for even the most inept user to immediately grasp it.

[jabhorse]

"Is there any reason tu use Slackware nowadays? "

I work at a global fortune 100 company and we use linux. IT deploys RedHat and it is a huge source of problems at our company. We have also tried Ubuntu, Debian, ArchLinux, Suse (which our customers use), For all the claims of how great all these "newer" distributions are - when put to a hard test of 24/7 heavy service and frequent software installations and upgrades, none of the "package management" tools hold up. At some point the package management tools can't figure out what to do and then its double trouble because of extra layers of package management software in-between the applications and the OS. We still end up having to compile code from source at some point. In addition, the extra layers of package management really just increase troubleshooting time by several magnitudes. The distribution where we don't have these problems is Slackware. The reason for this is simple - Slackware is a full distribution and there are no extra layers of software between the applications and the OS just to make things "easy" for people who prefer not to get technical. The basic difference is that Slackware is, without a doubt, the most stable distribution out on the market today regardless of whether you know that or not. Stability means something in a commercial production business environment.

[pal666]

Are you really that obtuse? Slackware has the best package manager of any Linux or *BSD system I have ever used. Unlike apt and rpm based systems I don't have to fight the package manager to keep my system the way I like it.

your hands grow out of your ass if you have to fight real package manager

[Drakeo]

...so you have packaging management crap offloaded to human being. IMHO it is a very questionable idea. We all know humans are most unreliable part of any system. Not to mention I prefer to waste machines time on routine tasks like package management. But it seems slackware users are fine with wasting time on routine technical crap. Whatever, but systemd saves me a plenty of time and does it job better than venerable sysv init and bugged scripts never bothering self to check for errors, timeouts, return codes and other "useless crap". Which turns system management into a suboptimal experience, actually.

Not going to get into the systemd stuff. If it was a tool need by a slacker "learn what a Slacker is" it will be in the tool belt. As a person that uses pbuilder and builds in debian and slackware. there is not one package manager out there that does dependencies. Not one. There is a script that reads your debian info and works with other programs to accomplish one task. The developer and builder sitting down writing it out. As for boot up time why do you reboot so much and my slackware 14.2 beta boots much faster then my ubuntu 15.04 or my debian 7.9 and my Kubuntu 14.04 lts. do not go there about boot times. Everything is a tool to me. And I build in the environment the team leader has set up. when I am on my projects it is Slackware.