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Slackware is the first Linux distro that I used. I recently (last year or so) I got back to it, because all the crap Debian was pouring over upstream got harder

• pjc50 12y ago
  Interesting; Slackware was my first distro (dozen floppy disks) as well. I too am interested in not having policykit or much of the modern desktop stuff.
  • jballanc 12y ago
    Dozen! I remember when Slackware fit on a single 3.5" floppy. There was a second disk, but you only needed that if you wanted to install X, and why would you want X when you had virtual terminals you could just switch between?
    • rahimnathwani 12y ago
      Thanks for making me feel young :) When I first used Slackware, I think the base set was 13 floppies, and that didn't include networking or X. This was before insmod/modprobe and I had to re-compile the kernel once I'd saved up the 80 pounds to buy a sound card. The compilation took the whole night on my 486, and I needed several attempts before I got it working. Kernel 1.1.59 I think.
  • weland 12y ago
    I think it still has them, but I can pretend not to care about them because I don't have to set them up, which I would have had to do on Gentoo. You literally just install Slackware and it works. It can skip the "modern" desktop crap though, that's cool. They don't distribute Gnome anymore, so it doesn't cram hundreds of libwhythefuckisthisalib and libgnomewhythefuckisthisagnomelib and their dependencies on the drive, and all the KDE stuff is nicely tucked away so you don't have to install it.
• pedrow 12y ago
  I've always been keen to try Slackware (probably dating back 10 years or more) but always been too daunted by the installation instructions. I tried again today - it's completely different from what I remember and very straightforward. I am installing it now (under VirtualBox) - wish me luck!
• contingencies 12y ago
  My first too, 3.0. I remember laughing at the package descriptions while installing, one in particular: bison: a parser-generator in the style of yacc. I eventually left because the lack of meaningful package management was becoming too much of a hassle maintaining systems longer term. For years I then roamed between various distros, trying most of what was out there, and finally settled on Gentoo around the mid noughties which I found to offer the same or higher degree of control but without the manual process overhead. Strangely, with the way containers are going, I think I'm actually becoming more likely to head back towards Slackware's userspace as a well tested and documented minimalist environment, in the near future than in the recent past.
  • weland 12y ago
    Lack of package management drove me away, too, but now I don't find it so much of a hassle because I have developed an active distaste for programs that bring a ton of dependencies. There are legitimate cases (e.g. Calibre -- has many dependencies because it must be able to read many kinds of files), but a depressingly large proportion of the programs with dependency headaches are just bloated or badly packaged.
• giancarlostoro 12y ago
  Slackware was my first taste of Linux as well. I'm hoping to go back to my first love once I get new hard drives on my computer.
• shimshim 12y ago
  I played around with Slax for a while, it was alot of fun. Most of my current experience is with apt and yum-based distros so having something different for packages is alot of fun. Slax is also fairly small.
• Blackthorn 12y ago
  Whoa there, don't throw llvm into the mix with those other names.