6 ms·

I’ve already seen countless comments about Slackware being a lot of folks first Linux distro. For someone like me who didn’t get into programming until the last

by 40four 5y ago

I’ve already seen countless comments about Slackware being a lot of folks first Linux distro. For someone like me who didn’t get into programming until the last 5 years or so, can you guys explain what was it about Slackware, that was so appealing or inviting to new users? As a primarily Ubuntu user in my time, was part of it that the Linux landscape was much less mature back then? Was it the principals/ ethos that the project stood behind? The community? All of the above? Haha, I’m very curious. I’ve always knew of the distro, but never had a good reason to use it these days. It still clearly has a cult like following, and I don’t know the history of it honestly.

deelowe 5y ago
Slackware is a no frills distro and arguably the baseline for all linux distros. It’s appealing because of the lack of magic or distro specific customizations. If you want a distro that just lets you do what you need to do without getting in the way, it’s very appealing. If you want a distro that prevents you from shooting yourself in the foot, look elsewhere.
- nomel 5y ago
  > that prevents you from shooting yourself in the foot, look elsewhere. I remember having to re-run the installation many times, from selecting the wrong options during installation.
  - throwaway984393 5y ago
    There's the best reason to use Slack: it builds character.
- pietromenna 5y ago
  A bonus point is that Slackware does not rely on systemd. it is still a bunch of bash scripts that you can figure out what is going on.
  - jonstewart 5y ago
    ^This!^ Slackware uses a BSD-style init system, where you just have one big shell script for booting the system -- you can read through it and edit it, it's all right there, self-contained. Additionally, all of the old Unix tomes still largely apply to Slackware. That's increasingly, and distressingly, not true of most other distros.
StevePerkins 5y ago
Initially, back in the early 1990's I think it was the only "distribution" of Linux out there. It was either download Slackware to 3.5" floppies, or else hand-roll your own distribution completely from scratch. I think RedHat came along in the mid to late 90's. I jumped ship and never looked back, because RPM packages were so much more convenient then Slackware's hodgepodge of configure scripts and makefiles. Ubuntu then came along in the 2000's, around the time that RedHat got bought by IBM and became less cool, and that's been more or less the state of things ever since because Ubuntu-based distros tend to have better hardware detection and support.
- sidpatil 5y ago
  > Ubuntu then came along in the 2000's, around the time that RedHat got bought by IBM IBM bought Red Hat only three years ago.
  - StevePerkins 5y ago
    You're right. I am thinking about when the re-branded the "free as in beer" RedHat as "Fedora", with only a 6-month cycle.
- buescher 5y ago
  There was SLS before it. By the time I could afford to cobble together a machine capable of running Linux, Slackware had superceded SLS and Red Hat and other distros you may have heard of didn't exist yet. Red Hat became the beginner's Linux very quickly after it was released. All this happened in a pretty short time frame from 1993-1996 or so.
- DoneWithAllThat 5y ago
  Yggdrasil’s first release was a year before Slackware’s.
dleslie 5y ago
For myself, it was literally _the_ distro. There simply wasn't any other available to me, at the time.
LennyHenrysNuts 5y ago
It's a proper linux distro. Everything is in a sensible place. If you want to configure your system, you configure it with.. configuration files. If you break it, you get to keep both bits.
sam345 5y ago
Speaking for myself only, it was my first linux distro in mid to late 1990s. Computer books, large reference type computer books were a thing back then. You could buy books titled something like "Slackware Bible" in very large print on the cover that promised to tell you how to run your own web server and maybe email server. In the back of the book were cd roms that had the Slackware source ready to build. It was immensely attractive to me. The internet was not much a thing back then, mostly AOL for regular Joe's. For academics or adventurous types there were universities and independent isps offering gopher,www and Usenet sites. Downloading distros over 2800k modems was not something you wanted to do. I remember installing Slackware but imo at the time it was horribly primitive and esoteric and promised days of driver and build hell. I remember having to build everything from source and wondering why in the hell was that required and it was not uncommon to o completely wreck your system by installing the wrong library or passing the scripts the wrong flags, etc. But it did get you a web server and other cool stuff. You could for nearly free host a website in your bedroom. But it could break at any time (I mean the whole system, requiring rebuild from scratch). I never enjoyed linux installs until I discovered debian in the early 2000s which was a God send. My apologies if my memories are off and no take slight to Slackware developers intended, it was just the state of the technology at the time. For the time the efforts were amazing.
- Underphil 5y ago
  I only use Linux these days (except when troubleshooting user machines) but I remember my brain was so poisoned by 'the Windows way' back in the 90s I just got frustrated with Slackware. Had I just RTFM or bought a book I could have removed that brainwashing so much sooner. I think it was SuSE that finally clicked for me.
aflag 5y ago
Slackware seemed the most mature at the time I started. Also, I really liked the way they split the packages into directories. I could just download the things I needed in one go. When you only have access to dial up, having to download stuff during installation is painful. So, I’d download all I needed over the course of a couple days, then I’d install it with all the needed stuff already in there. After I got more used to how things worked, I eventually moved towards Redhat until I finally landed on Debian.
steve76 5y ago
twh270 5y ago
> what was ... so appealing or inviting to new users? Back in the early '90s, if you had an "IBM-compatible personal computer" in your home, it almost certainly was running either DOS or Windows as its operating system. And that was fine for most people, but some of us were enthusiasts, geeks, and nerds. We liked technology. We enjoyed fine-tuning our systems, learning all about them, and programming. And sure, you could tinker some with DOS/Windows, but it was fundamentally a closed system. For me, the appeal of Slackware (and Linux in general) was that it opened a door to a whole universe of software and source code that was previously inaccessible, as well as the feeling of belonging to a community of like-minded enthusiasts and geeks that loved and worked on it. A free, open-source Unix-like operating system that ran on your PC at home -- how cool was that!? (Spoiler: very!) I'd heard things about how 'powerful' Unix was -- and now I had my very own, and it even came with source code. I was also a believer in the nascent free software movement. So that's a longwinded way to say yes, all of the above. Community, geeking out over cool new technology, and as a programmer, getting access to a completely open, hackable machine.
- hulitu 5y ago
  Also windows was a toy back then. All big programs (CAD, CAE, DTP) ran on UNIX. It was later that those programs were ported to Windows, also due to the fact that Intel convinced everyone that Itanium will ship. The rest is history.
kloch 5y ago
I think my first Linux distro was actually Yggdrasil, but right after that I tried Slackware and found it was much more complete and easy to use. You could also order a 4 CD box from Walnut Creek with tons of packages. I kept subscriptions from Walnut Creek to both FreeBSD and Slackware for about 10 years. They would automatically send me new versions as soon as they were released.
paisawalla 5y ago
Slackware was themed after the Church of the Subgenius, which is a satirical religion and online movement about "slack" as a cosmic force. It came from a time when software projects could be more whimsical and show some character. It's almost impossible to imagine a software project today expressing any kind of off-topic flair, or really be eccentric in that kind of way. There's hardly anything like it today, but the appeal of something so quirky I think is still easily understood. Edit: I think at one point there was a Linux distro based on My Little Pony, is that right? It was a different time, you had a new space that had just opened up for creative exploration, and it was accessible mostly to nerds and people on the fringe. There were a lot of weird things coming out back then.
- jimjimjim 5y ago
  Praise Bob
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  Don't forget RebeccaBlackOS, which apparently somehow managed to actually be somewhat technically interesting by defaulting to Wayland before that was a thing normal distros did. https://distrowatch.com/table-mobile.php?distribution=rebeccablackos https://distrowatch.com/table-mobile.php?distribution=rebecc...
abhiyerra 5y ago
The reason for me was Slackware back in the 90s had a run Linux on a DOS partition version. I believe this was Slackware 7.0. It was easier to install for a 12-year-old me than to figure out what fdisk outputs meant. Slackware made it super easy in that it just installed within the FAT32 partition. I learned a lot, I was on AOL at the time so I couldn't figure out certain things like XFree86 or vim since AOL didn't work on Linux. So whenever I was stuck I would literally restart the machine to Windows, go online, look up how to do something, take notes, and restart back to Linux to try what I was doing. It took a long time... But it made me extremely comfortable with the command line, and figure out where Linux breaks since Slackware was such a simple system. Though I moved on to FreeBSD, then Gentoo, then Debian, and Ubuntu. I still think Slackware was a solid place to start. I guess it has led me to my current path of running a DevOps consulting company...
blihp 5y ago
Slackware was one of the first distros and was Debian before there was a Debian[1] Also, there was a convenient offline CD archive version (Walnut Creek, IIRC) of it you could get for ~$20 which included several CDs worth of software (i.e. a couple/few gigs of files) before inexpensive ISPs were a thing and the world was still largely on dialup. (i.e. download times were on the order of minutes per megabyte) So getting those Slackware CDs was a bargain and orders of magnitude faster than attempting to download software for most. [1] It was released a few months before Debian so there was no Debian, no Ubuntu, no RedHat etc... these were all distros that mostly started taking off in the to mid- to late-90's. (Ubuntu of course didn't start until early this century) For the very earliest releases of Linux you had to download boot and root floppy images and then piece together what you needed for a working system. Usually this also included recompiling or at least re-linking the kernel... it was that primitive. Then there was this new concept of a Linux 'distribution' with the likes of Slackware that took the pain out of the process and caught on very quickly.
pjmlp 5y ago
It was one of the very first Linux distributions, so if you already an adult in computing around 1994, it was a natural way to dive into Linux. On my case, it was offered alongside the Linux Unleashed book series, which on the first edition was shipping Slackware 2.0 with it. Then as Patrick mentions on the annoucement, they got to be available in Walnut Creek CD-ROM collection, which was the way to get FOSS CDs shipped to your from anywhere in the world. So you had basically FreeBSD, Slackware, Red-Hat, Debian and Yasdrill (which quickly fade away), Mandrake and SuSE came a bit later. For me Slackware only lost relevance when Linux distributions adopted the package concept from UNIX clones, thus easing the pain to hunt dependencies with tarballs, or having to use alien to convert them.
trodrigues 5y ago
I started using Linux around 2003 when I got into college and when I got my first laptop and at the time the most popular distros were Red Hat (transitioning into Fedora Core which had just come out), Mandrake, Suse, Debian, maybe a few others. Most of these mainstream distros (except maybe Debian) were starting to go in the direction of trying to become more user friendly. They had graphical installers rather then text based and they had all sorts of new graphical utilities for configuration and made various attempts at trying to automate and sort much of that configuration for you. Except that they were mostly terrible at that in those early years of these attempts. So the first thing I actually ever tried to install on that laptop was RedHat 9 and I couldn't get my USB DSL modem to work as well as other specific laptop hardware features. Then some folks I knew were using Slackware and told me to try it and there were guides on how to make that modem work with it so I started using it. And very quickly I realized that while on Slackware you had to generally do a lot more configuration in text files and through CLI utilities, it generally yielded the results you expected and things didn't magically happen. Meanwhile in those other distros that were trying to become more user friendly, you had all of these crazy graphical utilities that worked half of the time, sometimes mangled configuration files (the Suse ones were specially amazing at producing completely broken xorg.conf files) or just simply didn't work. I learned a lot about all of those because as I became more proficient with Linux I kinda became the goto guy in my college for a lot of people who are also new to Linux to help them sort out their Linux setups, specially on laptops. A few years later Ubuntu came along, kinda trying to do the same thing those other distros were doing but using mostly existing UI utilities (rather than creating new ones) and just made sure they actually worked. I ended up transitioning to Ubuntu (after a couple of years of Gentoo and Arch) and never looked back until I moved to macs in the early 2010s.
jbovlaste 5y ago
Got into Linux in 2008 with no knowledge and no help, Slackware was the first distro I successfully installed (after trying Debian). I tried Slackware after hearing the phrase "If you use RedHat, you learn RedHat. If you use Debian, you learn Debian. If you use Slackware, you learn Linux." Also, I had an old computer and very poor internet, so the all-in-one DVD approach appealed to me. I downloaded the Slackbook and got to it, and it patiently taught me what a filesystem was, how boot works, what X was, how to use the terminal, and so on. Other operating systems took a lot of that for granted! They assumed I had resources, and Slackware would work with pretty well nothing. If Slackware took more time to use, time was all I had! And if Slackware made me learn things to use it properly, it was well worth it! Even now, 14 years later, lots of skills I learned are still useful - bash, the boot process, compiling software, managing dependencies (I once wanted ffmpeg with all dependencies coming from subversion, so I coded up an updater/build manager in 100% shell! Slackware taught me to do that :) I used it for many years, distro hopping in the background, before eventually migrating to Debian. Life moved on, and I had less time to deal with "how do I build THIS from source?" and I wanted something that would help me out a bit more. Slackware has given me an appreciation for stability. There is really something big about lasting decades. I can use those things, and also the things I know today, rather than having half the things I knew two years ago going in the bin. Bit of a ramble. I suppose I have a lot of affection for the distro, it was a formative environment for me.

by 40four 5y ago

deelowe 5y ago

Slackware is a no frills distro and arguably the baseline for all linux distros. It’s appealing because of the lack of magic or distro specific customizations. If you want a distro that just lets you do what you need to do without getting in the way, it’s very appealing. If you want a distro that prevents you from shooting yourself in the foot, look elsewhere.

nomel 5y ago
> that prevents you from shooting yourself in the foot, look elsewhere. I remember having to re-run the installation many times, from selecting the wrong options during installation.
- throwaway984393 5y ago
  There's the best reason to use Slack: it builds character.
pietromenna 5y ago
A bonus point is that Slackware does not rely on systemd. it is still a bunch of bash scripts that you can figure out what is going on.
- jonstewart 5y ago
  ^This!^ Slackware uses a BSD-style init system, where you just have one big shell script for booting the system -- you can read through it and edit it, it's all right there, self-contained. Additionally, all of the old Unix tomes still largely apply to Slackware. That's increasingly, and distressingly, not true of most other distros.

StevePerkins 5y ago

Initially, back in the early 1990's I think it was the only "distribution" of Linux out there. It was either download Slackware to 3.5" floppies, or else hand-roll your own distribution completely from scratch. I think RedHat came along in the mid to late 90's. I jumped ship and never looked back, because RPM packages were so much more convenient then Slackware's hodgepodge of configure scripts and makefiles. Ubuntu then came along in the 2000's, around the time that RedHat got bought by IBM and became less cool, and that's been more or less the state of things ever since because Ubuntu-based distros tend to have better hardware detection and support.

sidpatil 5y ago
> Ubuntu then came along in the 2000's, around the time that RedHat got bought by IBM IBM bought Red Hat only three years ago.
- StevePerkins 5y ago
  You're right. I am thinking about when the re-branded the "free as in beer" RedHat as "Fedora", with only a 6-month cycle.
buescher 5y ago
There was SLS before it. By the time I could afford to cobble together a machine capable of running Linux, Slackware had superceded SLS and Red Hat and other distros you may have heard of didn't exist yet. Red Hat became the beginner's Linux very quickly after it was released. All this happened in a pretty short time frame from 1993-1996 or so.
DoneWithAllThat 5y ago
Yggdrasil’s first release was a year before Slackware’s.

dleslie 5y ago

For myself, it was literally _the_ distro. There simply wasn't any other available to me, at the time.

LennyHenrysNuts 5y ago

It's a proper linux distro. Everything is in a sensible place. If you want to configure your system, you configure it with.. configuration files. If you break it, you get to keep both bits.

sam345 5y ago

Speaking for myself only, it was my first linux distro in mid to late 1990s. Computer books, large reference type computer books were a thing back then. You could buy books titled something like "Slackware Bible" in very large print on the cover that promised to tell you how to run your own web server and maybe email server. In the back of the book were cd roms that had the Slackware source ready to build. It was immensely attractive to me. The internet was not much a thing back then, mostly AOL for regular Joe's. For academics or adventurous types there were universities and independent isps offering gopher,www and Usenet sites. Downloading distros over 2800k modems was not something you wanted to do. I remember installing Slackware but imo at the time it was horribly primitive and esoteric and promised days of driver and build hell. I remember having to build everything from source and wondering why in the hell was that required and it was not uncommon to o completely wreck your system by installing the wrong library or passing the scripts the wrong flags, etc. But it did get you a web server and other cool stuff. You could for nearly free host a website in your bedroom. But it could break at any time (I mean the whole system, requiring rebuild from scratch). I never enjoyed linux installs until I discovered debian in the early 2000s which was a God send. My apologies if my memories are off and no take slight to Slackware developers intended, it was just the state of the technology at the time. For the time the efforts were amazing.

Underphil 5y ago
I only use Linux these days (except when troubleshooting user machines) but I remember my brain was so poisoned by 'the Windows way' back in the 90s I just got frustrated with Slackware. Had I just RTFM or bought a book I could have removed that brainwashing so much sooner. I think it was SuSE that finally clicked for me.

aflag 5y ago

Slackware seemed the most mature at the time I started. Also, I really liked the way they split the packages into directories. I could just download the things I needed in one go. When you only have access to dial up, having to download stuff during installation is painful. So, I’d download all I needed over the course of a couple days, then I’d install it with all the needed stuff already in there. After I got more used to how things worked, I eventually moved towards Redhat until I finally landed on Debian.

steve76 5y ago

twh270 5y ago

> what was ... so appealing or inviting to new users? Back in the early '90s, if you had an "IBM-compatible personal computer" in your home, it almost certainly was running either DOS or Windows as its operating system. And that was fine for most people, but some of us were enthusiasts, geeks, and nerds. We liked technology. We enjoyed fine-tuning our systems, learning all about them, and programming. And sure, you could tinker some with DOS/Windows, but it was fundamentally a closed system. For me, the appeal of Slackware (and Linux in general) was that it opened a door to a whole universe of software and source code that was previously inaccessible, as well as the feeling of belonging to a community of like-minded enthusiasts and geeks that loved and worked on it. A free, open-source Unix-like operating system that ran on your PC at home -- how cool was that!? (Spoiler: very!) I'd heard things about how 'powerful' Unix was -- and now I had my very own, and it even came with source code. I was also a believer in the nascent free software movement. So that's a longwinded way to say yes, all of the above. Community, geeking out over cool new technology, and as a programmer, getting access to a completely open, hackable machine.

hulitu 5y ago
Also windows was a toy back then. All big programs (CAD, CAE, DTP) ran on UNIX. It was later that those programs were ported to Windows, also due to the fact that Intel convinced everyone that Itanium will ship. The rest is history.

kloch 5y ago

I think my first Linux distro was actually Yggdrasil, but right after that I tried Slackware and found it was much more complete and easy to use. You could also order a 4 CD box from Walnut Creek with tons of packages. I kept subscriptions from Walnut Creek to both FreeBSD and Slackware for about 10 years. They would automatically send me new versions as soon as they were released.

paisawalla 5y ago

Slackware was themed after the Church of the Subgenius, which is a satirical religion and online movement about "slack" as a cosmic force. It came from a time when software projects could be more whimsical and show some character. It's almost impossible to imagine a software project today expressing any kind of off-topic flair, or really be eccentric in that kind of way. There's hardly anything like it today, but the appeal of something so quirky I think is still easily understood. Edit: I think at one point there was a Linux distro based on My Little Pony, is that right? It was a different time, you had a new space that had just opened up for creative exploration, and it was accessible mostly to nerds and people on the fringe. There were a lot of weird things coming out back then.

jimjimjim 5y ago
Praise Bob
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
Don't forget RebeccaBlackOS, which apparently somehow managed to actually be somewhat technically interesting by defaulting to Wayland before that was a thing normal distros did. https://distrowatch.com/table-mobile.php?distribution=rebeccablackos https://distrowatch.com/table-mobile.php?distribution=rebecc...

abhiyerra 5y ago

The reason for me was Slackware back in the 90s had a run Linux on a DOS partition version. I believe this was Slackware 7.0. It was easier to install for a 12-year-old me than to figure out what fdisk outputs meant. Slackware made it super easy in that it just installed within the FAT32 partition. I learned a lot, I was on AOL at the time so I couldn't figure out certain things like XFree86 or vim since AOL didn't work on Linux. So whenever I was stuck I would literally restart the machine to Windows, go online, look up how to do something, take notes, and restart back to Linux to try what I was doing. It took a long time... But it made me extremely comfortable with the command line, and figure out where Linux breaks since Slackware was such a simple system. Though I moved on to FreeBSD, then Gentoo, then Debian, and Ubuntu. I still think Slackware was a solid place to start. I guess it has led me to my current path of running a DevOps consulting company...

blihp 5y ago

Slackware was one of the first distros and was Debian before there was a Debian[1] Also, there was a convenient offline CD archive version (Walnut Creek, IIRC) of it you could get for ~$20 which included several CDs worth of software (i.e. a couple/few gigs of files) before inexpensive ISPs were a thing and the world was still largely on dialup. (i.e. download times were on the order of minutes per megabyte) So getting those Slackware CDs was a bargain and orders of magnitude faster than attempting to download software for most. [1] It was released a few months before Debian so there was no Debian, no Ubuntu, no RedHat etc... these were all distros that mostly started taking off in the to mid- to late-90's. (Ubuntu of course didn't start until early this century) For the very earliest releases of Linux you had to download boot and root floppy images and then piece together what you needed for a working system. Usually this also included recompiling or at least re-linking the kernel... it was that primitive. Then there was this new concept of a Linux 'distribution' with the likes of Slackware that took the pain out of the process and caught on very quickly.

pjmlp 5y ago

It was one of the very first Linux distributions, so if you already an adult in computing around 1994, it was a natural way to dive into Linux. On my case, it was offered alongside the Linux Unleashed book series, which on the first edition was shipping Slackware 2.0 with it. Then as Patrick mentions on the annoucement, they got to be available in Walnut Creek CD-ROM collection, which was the way to get FOSS CDs shipped to your from anywhere in the world. So you had basically FreeBSD, Slackware, Red-Hat, Debian and Yasdrill (which quickly fade away), Mandrake and SuSE came a bit later. For me Slackware only lost relevance when Linux distributions adopted the package concept from UNIX clones, thus easing the pain to hunt dependencies with tarballs, or having to use alien to convert them.

trodrigues 5y ago

I started using Linux around 2003 when I got into college and when I got my first laptop and at the time the most popular distros were Red Hat (transitioning into Fedora Core which had just come out), Mandrake, Suse, Debian, maybe a few others. Most of these mainstream distros (except maybe Debian) were starting to go in the direction of trying to become more user friendly. They had graphical installers rather then text based and they had all sorts of new graphical utilities for configuration and made various attempts at trying to automate and sort much of that configuration for you. Except that they were mostly terrible at that in those early years of these attempts. So the first thing I actually ever tried to install on that laptop was RedHat 9 and I couldn't get my USB DSL modem to work as well as other specific laptop hardware features. Then some folks I knew were using Slackware and told me to try it and there were guides on how to make that modem work with it so I started using it. And very quickly I realized that while on Slackware you had to generally do a lot more configuration in text files and through CLI utilities, it generally yielded the results you expected and things didn't magically happen. Meanwhile in those other distros that were trying to become more user friendly, you had all of these crazy graphical utilities that worked half of the time, sometimes mangled configuration files (the Suse ones were specially amazing at producing completely broken xorg.conf files) or just simply didn't work. I learned a lot about all of those because as I became more proficient with Linux I kinda became the goto guy in my college for a lot of people who are also new to Linux to help them sort out their Linux setups, specially on laptops. A few years later Ubuntu came along, kinda trying to do the same thing those other distros were doing but using mostly existing UI utilities (rather than creating new ones) and just made sure they actually worked. I ended up transitioning to Ubuntu (after a couple of years of Gentoo and Arch) and never looked back until I moved to macs in the early 2010s.

jbovlaste 5y ago

Got into Linux in 2008 with no knowledge and no help, Slackware was the first distro I successfully installed (after trying Debian). I tried Slackware after hearing the phrase "If you use RedHat, you learn RedHat. If you use Debian, you learn Debian. If you use Slackware, you learn Linux." Also, I had an old computer and very poor internet, so the all-in-one DVD approach appealed to me. I downloaded the Slackbook and got to it, and it patiently taught me what a filesystem was, how boot works, what X was, how to use the terminal, and so on. Other operating systems took a lot of that for granted! They assumed I had resources, and Slackware would work with pretty well nothing. If Slackware took more time to use, time was all I had! And if Slackware made me learn things to use it properly, it was well worth it! Even now, 14 years later, lots of skills I learned are still useful - bash, the boot process, compiling software, managing dependencies (I once wanted ffmpeg with all dependencies coming from subversion, so I coded up an updater/build manager in 100% shell! Slackware taught me to do that :) I used it for many years, distro hopping in the background, before eventually migrating to Debian. Life moved on, and I had less time to deal with "how do I build THIS from source?" and I wanted something that would help me out a bit more. Slackware has given me an appreciation for stability. There is really something big about lasting decades. I can use those things, and also the things I know today, rather than having half the things I knew two years ago going in the bin. Bit of a ramble. I suppose I have a lot of affection for the distro, it was a formative environment for me.