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It's kinda sad that no one recommends Slackware Linux anymore. Back in the day there we used to say: "when you know slackware you know Linux. When you know red

by znpy 6y ago

It's kinda sad that no one recommends Slackware Linux anymore. Back in the day there we used to say: "when you know slackware you know Linux. When you know red hat all you know is red hat". Effectively when I got into slackware my computer wasn't 100% working all of the time but I learned a lot. I then moved on and years later I got rhcsa certified and that's very worth it too. Not sure about arch, I never really used that, but I can vouch for slackware, Gentoo and the RedHat/centos/rhcsa thing.

teekert 6y ago
I started with Slackware (~18 years ago) but it was just pain with no standard package manager. Sure, later I found slapt-get and I turned to dropline-gnome at some point. But moving to any apt distro, Mandrake, Arch or even Gentoo just felt like a warm bath to me back in the day.
nonbirithm 6y ago
I tried using Slackware since everyone said it was the most Unixy distro, but then I ran across a bunch of issues. I don't want to seem like I'm berating Slackware or anything, since I might not understand how to use it coming from Arch, but this was just my experience. I remember needing to use Clang for ccls but found out that the version of CMake included didn't support C++17, then when I tried upgrading CMake I found that some library named libarchive was too old to use as a dependency, so I essentially had to spend hours of time upgrading things to versions not supported on Slackware just to get to the point where I could use Clang. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have to spend all that time if I was using pacman instead where the important packages are all up to date and I could get to work within a few minutes. Honestly only the distros with a large enough community like Arch or Gentoo would probably have enough people to submit and maintain even the most obscure packages. Also, there was no easy way to do a system upgrade. In Arch Linux, which is what I'm used to, you can usually do 'pacman -Syu' without too much fuss, but the Slack document for upgrading the kernel is a multistep process that I couldn't successfully complete. (It even wishes you "good luck".) Third-party packages on slackbuilds have no automatic dependency resolution either (!) which was very painful every single time I needed a package not in the official repository, which was all the time in my case. I could literally feel my heart sink every time I needed a slackbuilds package and it required upgrading a system dependency. Apparently this was a political decision instead of a technical one[1], which I don't understand because pacman handles it fine. I also had integrated graphics issues that caused Firefox to hang on startup or Love2D to freeze, forcing me to kill the X server, for which I found no solution. Arch ran them fine. This was on a ThinkPad, by the way. It could just be a philosophy thing, or that people with my specific needs are better served by other distros, or maybe I've been hopelessly spoiled by Arch and can't see the benefit Slack brings over it yet. But I have to admit I am still mildly curious about it, just not in the sense of using it as a daily driver. [1] https://slackbuilds.org/faq/#deps https://slackbuilds.org/faq/#deps
kdtsh 6y ago
Absolutely. If you’re looking to just learn about Linux, you can’t go much further than Slackware. It’s as Linux as you can get: you can learn distros (which admittedly is easier now that many are built on a few different platforms - GNOME, xfce, systemd, etc.), but Slackware gives you a kernel, core-utils, and a bunch of packages - can’t get much simpler than that. Also once you track -current and get around SlackBuilds you can install almost anything you want, it’s a full-fledged and modern distro. Without dependency management to be sure, but if you’ve got a well-made distro and you compile most of the software you install, who needs it?

by znpy 6y ago

teekert 6y ago

I started with Slackware (~18 years ago) but it was just pain with no standard package manager. Sure, later I found slapt-get and I turned to dropline-gnome at some point. But moving to any apt distro, Mandrake, Arch or even Gentoo just felt like a warm bath to me back in the day.

nonbirithm 6y ago

I tried using Slackware since everyone said it was the most Unixy distro, but then I ran across a bunch of issues. I don't want to seem like I'm berating Slackware or anything, since I might not understand how to use it coming from Arch, but this was just my experience. I remember needing to use Clang for ccls but found out that the version of CMake included didn't support C++17, then when I tried upgrading CMake I found that some library named libarchive was too old to use as a dependency, so I essentially had to spend hours of time upgrading things to versions not supported on Slackware just to get to the point where I could use Clang. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have to spend all that time if I was using pacman instead where the important packages are all up to date and I could get to work within a few minutes. Honestly only the distros with a large enough community like Arch or Gentoo would probably have enough people to submit and maintain even the most obscure packages. Also, there was no easy way to do a system upgrade. In Arch Linux, which is what I'm used to, you can usually do 'pacman -Syu' without too much fuss, but the Slack document for upgrading the kernel is a multistep process that I couldn't successfully complete. (It even wishes you "good luck".) Third-party packages on slackbuilds have no automatic dependency resolution either (!) which was very painful every single time I needed a package not in the official repository, which was all the time in my case. I could literally feel my heart sink every time I needed a slackbuilds package and it required upgrading a system dependency. Apparently this was a political decision instead of a technical one[1], which I don't understand because pacman handles it fine. I also had integrated graphics issues that caused Firefox to hang on startup or Love2D to freeze, forcing me to kill the X server, for which I found no solution. Arch ran them fine. This was on a ThinkPad, by the way. It could just be a philosophy thing, or that people with my specific needs are better served by other distros, or maybe I've been hopelessly spoiled by Arch and can't see the benefit Slack brings over it yet. But I have to admit I am still mildly curious about it, just not in the sense of using it as a daily driver. [1] https://slackbuilds.org/faq/#deps https://slackbuilds.org/faq/#deps

kdtsh 6y ago

Absolutely. If you’re looking to just learn about Linux, you can’t go much further than Slackware. It’s as Linux as you can get: you can learn distros (which admittedly is easier now that many are built on a few different platforms - GNOME, xfce, systemd, etc.), but Slackware gives you a kernel, core-utils, and a bunch of packages - can’t get much simpler than that. Also once you track -current and get around SlackBuilds you can install almost anything you want, it’s a full-fledged and modern distro. Without dependency management to be sure, but if you’ve got a well-made distro and you compile most of the software you install, who needs it?