Slackware: "True Linux experience"?

clutch · 2010-06-18 03:41:48

Every 6 months or so I install Slackware on my laptop, and every time I keep it a little bit longer than the last. A few weeks ago was my third time around and I lasted about two days before switching back to Arch.

I want very badly to like Slackware, because the concept sounds awesome on paper. In practice though, I simply don't have the time/patience for it.

Trent · 2010-06-18 13:11:01

clutch wrote:

Every 6 months or so I install Slackware on my laptop, and every time I keep it a little bit longer than the last. A few weeks ago was my third time around and I lasted about two days before switching back to Arch.
I want very badly to like Slackware, because the concept sounds awesome on paper. In practice though, I simply don't have the time/patience for it.

I have almost exactly the same relationship with Gentoo. Slackware never had much of a draw for me.

davidm · 2010-06-19 16:50:57

thedonvaughn wrote:

I used Slackware back when I still had to install an OS using floppy disks. This was around late 94, 95?

Same here. Slackware was my first Linux (excluding remote shell accounts) back when I was 17 years old. To be honest sometimes I do get annoyed at all the BS package managers bring in. There's something to be said for doing it all by hand and understanding all the little configure options. OTOH, it isn't a lot of fun having to resolve dependencies when they are severely conflicting and tangled with several other programs on your system. Arch's system is a great balance for me.

I do think the author is right in that slackware (as well as Linux From Scratch) still is a great choice for learning and that running and administering slackware will overall teach you more than the typical Arch install. It will be harder but I suppose that's part of the point, no?

Ranguvar wrote:

Slackware is "pure" in the sense that it is very, very vanilla. Even more so than Arch.
It has been said that if you use Debian (or insert other distro here) for six months, you will learn Debian -- but if you use Slackware, you will learn GNU/Linux.
I find this actually pretty accurate.

+1

Last edited by davidm (2010-06-19 16:57:34)

bladdo · 2010-06-19 17:53:26

Slackware is a great staring point for people who want to learn how Linux works. It is pure in the sense of how bare bones it is.

I started on Slackware and I loved it ( and still do in some sense).

moljac024 · 2010-06-20 06:44:04

Let's put it into perspective:
Slackware is the only true vanilla GNU/Linux distro, right?
So, GNU/Linux = Slackware

Now, let's adjust that saying:
If you use Debian (or insert other distro here) for six months, you will learn Debian -- but if you use Slackware, you will learn Slackware.

Sounds awesome

.:B:. · 2010-06-20 07:09:08

Slackware, imho, is mostly ancient. It's a bit like a dinosaur. It's still around, and it still works, but there are better evolutionary lifeforms around.

Don't get me wrong - I love Slackware and its philosophy, it's just that it has some prehistorical views (on package management mostly). There are a lot of patched up solutions around to fix its shortcomings, but to me they feel messy. I absolutely love the lightness of Slackware, though. Arch could learn from it .

gazj · 2010-06-20 08:50:49

Misfit138 wrote:

Slackware and Pat are very cool. I have nothing bad to say about any of it.
Arch just fits me better.

I totally agree with this. Pat does something right, he's been round a long time and has a small army of very loyal followers. This alone makes slackware very cool. I have a lot of respect for it.

spctrl · 2010-06-20 08:56:30

Purism.. I don't know, but I just want to use my computer - and that's what linux (ANY distro) does for me. I don't care if it is arch, ubuntu, debian, or whatever. These types of discussions lead nowhere - if you feel slack is for you, fine! if not, fine! Just use what enables you to do what you want to do and leave purism rotting in a hole somehwere.

boydrice · 2010-06-21 14:07:01

For those who have posted saying that Slackware is not fit for the desktop or is a dinosaur very clearly have not used Slackware. I am not trying to say Slackware is better for anyone than any other Distro, but those comments are just plain FUD. Slackware gives you a very useable desktop(KDE or Xfce) right out of the box. As for package management Slackware comes with a great set of tools, pkgtool and slackpkg. As for third-party the excellent sbopkg is a fantastic tool to handle the slackbuilds at slackbuilds.org. Yes none of these resolve dependencies however due to how Slackware does its packaging the dependencies that are not already satisfied are minimal at best. I think one time I have had to grab 5 dependencies at the most for the e-17 wm. This idea that you have 30 deps to resolve manually is just not true. Anyway to each their own. As for the original topic any linux distro is a "true linux experience" Slackware just tends to be more unix-like than most.

sHyLoCk · 2010-06-21 14:27:31

boydrice wrote:

For those who have posted saying that Slackware is not fit for the desktop or is a dinosaur very clearly have not used Slackware. I am not trying to say Slackware is better for anyone than any other Distro, but those comments are just plain FUD. Slackware gives you a very useable desktop(KDE or Xfce) right out of the box. As for package management Slackware comes with a great set of tools, pkgtool and slackpkg. As for third-party the excellent sbopkg is a fantastic tool to handle the slackbuilds at slackbuilds.org. Yes none of these resolve dependencies however due to how Slackware does its packaging the dependencies that are not already satisfied are minimal at best. I think one time I have had to grab 5 dependencies at the most for the e-17 wm. This idea that you have 30 deps to resolve manually is just not true. Anyway to each their own. As for the original topic any linux distro is a "true linux experience" Slackware just tends to be more unix-like than most.

Actually we did use Slackware to be able to know more about it's usefulness than just repeating some "wiki-like cliches" over and over.

nixpunk · 2010-06-24 13:41:47

Misfit138 wrote:

Slackware and Pat are very cool.

^Exactly how I feel.

Also, the author wrote, "there's only one truly pure Linux." Wouldn't that just be the kernel?

Semantics aside, I am OK with using an impure distro.

BKLive · 2010-07-06 14:14:44

I used slackware for like 45 minutes once. Took me about 30 minutes to install an old version I had lying around from a magazine on a test computer (we're talking, 2005ish) and I opened the desktop was confounded at the amount of disk space used for the "Full Install", saw ten programs for the same thing (editors I believe) and so I tried to remove the packages and update the system... which if you've been reading this thread I could not do without prior knowledge.

Having said that, while I got 'fed up' with the system due to its initial 'bloat' (perceived I assure you), I switched back to my previous installation of....................... MEPIS!

I think this story gives credit to the previously mentioned, "The purest Linux experience is the one that is closest (or damn near) the expected end result." In the last fourteen years I went from RedHat floppies to Mandrake to LFS to Ubuntu to Mepis (for a while really) to Fedora (until v10 I used this only) to LinuxMint (which my family uses) all the while putting Arch on, deciding it was "too much" for me at the time and taking it off, to now running Arch only. What works for me now just didn't before, and that I can change as my needs to is what makes Linux itself pure: to my standards.

In case you were wondering I also went from Gnome (floppies!!!) to KDE for like 9 years and then XFCE, then *box, now i3. If you aren't tiling, you should give it a shot!

And lastly, since I love zealous posts about purity and perfection and distro-nazis galore: If you didn't install your first linux from a case of floppy disks, then you don't know ANYTHING about linux. Sounds ridiculous doesn't it? So does "If you do A and not B, then you suck"

valium97582 · 2010-07-06 16:04:34

The only thing that I regret in Arch are the kernel blobs and not-FLOSS software. Yes, I like utopias. But, in Brazil, there are pirate games here and there, and patents here cannot be stablished, so... Not _that_ guilty.

phildg · 2010-07-08 15:47:36

Most linux systems use a System V style init system, Slackware uses a BSD style one, so how can slackware be a true linux experience? Linux, or GNU/Linux is made of a collection of components. Each component has a purpose, however there may be multiple projects that can satisfy the requirements of said component. So by it's very nature there is no one distribution that can give a "true linux experience"

RHEL's first release was only 2 years after Slackware, and considering the usage RHEL sees against Slackware (especially in the corporate environment) does that make RHEL the true Linux experience? Debian's first release was only a month later than Slackware, so how does that fair up?

Also I think many people refer to the true linux experience as being able to compile and install from source using the ./configure; make; make install dance. This is only one small part of admining or using a Linux desktop, and a crap, unmaintainable way of installing software. When I used Slackware I always wrote slackbuild scripts to generate packages and used the package manager to install them, same with PKGBUILDs and Arch, SPEC files with RHEL and control files, etc on Debian.

If you can sit at distro X without (oops) moaning about how harder it is to achieve tasks A and B than it is on distro Y, then in my book you've experienced Linux truly.

Last edited by phildg (2010-07-08 18:26:35)

cesura · 2010-07-08 18:09:55

The only true linux experience is Linux From Scratch. Slackware has .tgz packages and what-not.

72linus · 2010-07-08 18:41:51

I think they are both similar in many ways
so much so I can mix apps, kernels, stuff from either arch or slack
and it usually works

I will say that Slackware's pkg system is simpler and it's much easier to make a pkg than in ARCH
in my opinion, being a newbie

I'd say Gentoo,LFS, or especially SourceMage
would be much closer to a "True Linux Experience" than either slack or arch
in terms of nuts&bolts stuff

I love both ARCH and Slackware, they define the "True Linux Experience" for me...

schivmeister · 2010-07-09 07:24:39

Thank you all for the input. As some of you have buffered a number of claims from the article, I can now conclude that the writer is not exactly zealous.

Last edited by schivmeister (2010-07-09 07:28:28)

Zeist · 2010-07-09 08:18:40

Glad to see that not everyone is negative to Slackware at least. Slackware was where I got started on Linux, and I still have one machine at home running it. It is a quite nice distribution indeed.

FxF · 2010-07-11 07:51:08

What does a "pure" or "true Linux experience" mean anyway? And does it really matter?

It's the kind of language/argument often used to justify believing something traditional or 'old-school' is better than advancements in software/technology/belief systems. Should we say that the only 'true programming experience' is hand-coding using machine code? We could, but isn't it an absurd point to make?

Saying that one distro is 'better' or 'more pure' totally misses the point about Linux imho. The beauty of Linux is that IT DEPENDS. It depends on the user's experience, what hardware they're using, what they're using their system to do, how much time they have (or want) to spend tweaking their system, etc. Overly simplistic descriptions or generalized value judgments like "better" or "more pure" may make a distro's fanboys feel better about their choice, but they lead to pointless arguing about which distro best fits those adjectives. imho

hitest · 2010-07-12 00:37:44

Misfit138 wrote:

Slackware and Pat are very cool. I have nothing bad to say about any of it.
Arch just fits me better.

Thank you for that. I do run Arch on one machine, and I like it a lot, but, Slackware is my primary OS. I very-much admire Arch, it is lean and fast. It reminds me a lot of Slackware and FreeBSD.

Arch Linux

#26 2010-06-18 03:41:48

Re: Slackware: "True Linux experience"?

#27 2010-06-18 13:11:01

Re: Slackware: "True Linux experience"?

#28 2010-06-19 16:50:57

Re: Slackware: "True Linux experience"?

#29 2010-06-19 17:53:26

Re: Slackware: "True Linux experience"?

#30 2010-06-20 06:44:04

Re: Slackware: "True Linux experience"?

#31 2010-06-20 07:09:08

Re: Slackware: "True Linux experience"?

#32 2010-06-20 08:50:49

Re: Slackware: "True Linux experience"?

#33 2010-06-20 08:56:30

Re: Slackware: "True Linux experience"?

#34 2010-06-21 14:07:01

Re: Slackware: "True Linux experience"?

#35 2010-06-21 14:27:31

Re: Slackware: "True Linux experience"?

#36 2010-06-24 13:41:47

Re: Slackware: "True Linux experience"?

#37 2010-07-06 14:14:44

Re: Slackware: "True Linux experience"?

#38 2010-07-06 16:04:34

Re: Slackware: "True Linux experience"?

#39 2010-07-08 15:47:36

Re: Slackware: "True Linux experience"?

#40 2010-07-08 18:09:55

Re: Slackware: "True Linux experience"?

#41 2010-07-08 18:41:51

Re: Slackware: "True Linux experience"?

#42 2010-07-09 07:24:39

Re: Slackware: "True Linux experience"?

#43 2010-07-09 08:18:40

Re: Slackware: "True Linux experience"?

#44 2010-07-11 07:51:08

Re: Slackware: "True Linux experience"?

#45 2010-07-12 00:37:44

Re: Slackware: "True Linux experience"?

Board footer