Slackware Turns 24 Years Old

[cbxbiker61]

Slackware is a bit like knowing how to use wood-working hand tools...you know how to do things at their most basic level. Modern distros are the power tools. Even though you do most of your work with power tools, you will always be a better craftsman by knowing how to use the hand tools.

[Apopas]

Legendary distro! Happy birthday!

[Luke_Wolf]

What exactly is missing for you?

Slackware is a fine distribution if you agree with the decisions of Pat on everything. However lets say for the sake of argument that you want say... Pulseaudio instead of just raw ALSA, I'm not going to argue the point why or why not, but let's just say you do... now a very large swath of your system needs to be recompiled, but unlike Gentoo that doesn't just mean adding a USE flag, recompile and being done with it, you have to track down Pat's slackbuild scripts (which aren't so easily accessible) and then figure out what you need to replace then go through and do it. Everything not included in the base you can tinker with well enough, but the base is just a mess to touch.

If someone wants to play tinkerer the way Slackware suggests itself to be, then Arch or Gentoo are really just the better choices unless all the manual dependency resolution is your idea of a fun time. The base just isn't flexible enough, and unless things have changed you're pretty much expected to be running the vanilla complete install rather than trying.

[andyprough]

As a longtime SUSE and openSUSE user, I raise a glass in toast to SUSE's parent distro.

[milkylainen]

Still running Slackware. 20 years later. Tried most distros on more than one occasion. I even have other distros at work, where I cannot choose an environment to my liking. Still prefer Slack at home.

[higuita]

Slackware already include pulseaudio, you can choose to use it or directly alsa

for many basic settings, no system is flexible enough, unless you recompile everything, so gentoo and LFS are the only ones flexible ones. all others, if you want to change libc, remove pulseaudio, pam, systemd, you are in into a system recompile

Most Pat decisions are based in logic and long analysis... not all will agree with him, but that is the power of linux, you can jump to another distro or recompile everything and build "your own distro"™ ... unlike windows, there is no "one size fits all" and slack never tried to be a distro for everyone. What slack tried to get is a solid base system, where everything just works and use each package upstream config and man pages

[timtas]

Slackware is a fine distribution if you agree with the decisions of Pat on everything. However lets say for the sake of argument that you want say... Pulseaudio instead of just raw ALSA, I'm not going to argue the point why or why not, but let's just say you do... now a very large swath of your system needs to be recompiled, but unlike Gentoo that doesn't just mean adding a USE flag, recompile and being done with it, you have to track down Pat's slackbuild scripts (which aren't so easily accessible) and then figure out what you need to replace then go through and do it. Everything not included in the base you can tinker with well enough, but the base is just a mess to touch.

If someone wants to play tinkerer the way Slackware suggests itself to be, then Arch or Gentoo are really just the better choices unless all the manual dependency resolution is your idea of a fun time. The base just isn't flexible enough, and unless things have changed you're pretty much expected to be running the vanilla complete install rather than trying.

First of all, as far as I know, Slackware actually moved to Pulseaudio. And then, if you dislike, let's say systemd, what alternatives do you have when using Fedora orch Arch Linux?

[fulalas]

off-topic : i miss Slax

Slax was really good! But I think Porteus is its successor. Take a look: http://ftp.vim.org/ftp/os/Linux/dist...orteus-v3.2.2/

[Luke_Wolf]

First of all, as far as I know, Slackware actually moved to Pulseaudio. And then, if you dislike, let's say systemd, what alternatives do you have when using Fedora orch Arch Linux?

Regardless if the situation with Pulsaudio has changed that doesn't invalidate my point in the least.

As to Fedora and Arch, Fedora doesn't push itself as a tinkerer's distro, it pushes itself as a developer/workstation distribution so speaking of it is pointless. Arch on the other hand https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/OpenRC there you go.

[MoonMoon]

... you have to track down Pat's slackbuild scripts (which aren't so easily accessible) ...

You mean like, looking on a Slackware mirror for the scripts? Or downloading the source ISO? Both ways you will get all the scripts: https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackw...urrent/source/