I suspect that might have been a driving factor because of course they knew the date was fast approaching. However it isn't that hard to build a new kernel in slackware anyway, it sticks pretty close to Vanilla kernel the way it's built.
Me too, I keep one installed in a VM for nostalgia. I've moved on to Arch since but that VM still handles my local rsync backup and languagetool install.
I spent hours, no, days recompiling the kernel of my slack installation, on a AMD K6-2, 1999 IIRC.
I really had a lot of free time those days in high school...
Slack is easy to pick up and easy to maintain.
You may want to consider trying sbopkg or similar if you find the package manager lacking, but it's worth noting that Slackware comes with a ton of great software in the base system (libraries and daemons)
If someone was choosing a Linux distro today, what would be some reasons to choose Slackware rather than another popular distro like Ubuntu, Fedora, or Arch?
Actually, there’s nothing “extreme” about Slackware, in fact, I find it easier to use, and more reliable than Ubuntu, for example. It is one of those things that you would say about: it’s perfect just the way it is.
The biggest one for me is that the mental model for maintaining your system is tiny. As a system it is easy to inspect how it works - you can trace the entire boot process along with a finger, the init system is excruciatingly simple, the package database is a directory with files each containing a brief description the output of a un-tar command, SlackBuild packages are easy to make and modify. The community is also very nice and has a lot of highly experienced users in it.
Most software I want is also already installed and ready to go. Some people like to craft their OS from a minimal base, and I absolutely respect that and understand that it gives them a system which is perfectly catered to their needs - but I’m very lazy, and am perfectly happy letting someone with over 30 years experience do all that for me :-)
That being said, I use Fedora at work and wouldn’t consider using Slackware. This is because I don’t want to know anything about my underlying system as long as it works and gives me the tools I need to do my work, and because GNOME is a boon to my workflow.
slackpkg :-) the OS is considered stable so you don’t generally get new major versions of software, but security and bug fixes are delivered regularly.
Slackware is more bare bones, so its good for learning linux.
It is also stable, people set up slackware servers and let it run for years.
But to be honest, modern distros are much more convenient esp for workstations. These days Slackware wouldn't be my first choice, but it brings up memories, had a lot of fun tinkering with it.
Over the years I've gone from Ubuntu to Debian to Slackware and back to Debian. I took a chance on Slackware for a few years precisely so that I could force myself to understand *nix from the bottom up. Unfortunately I didn't have nearly as much free time (or patience) as I needed to get the most out of the experience, and having to deal with missing dependencies turned out to be too much overhead for just getting anything else done. I'd definitely recommend it for folks who enjoy (and have the time for) getting their hands dirty.
Slackware was my first Linux too. I remember making the installation floppy disk set. And then it was my first introduction to running a computer others could remotely control. After learning how to dial up AOL from Linux then join an IRC chat room, I was immediately "pwned" by someone in that chat room who guessed my root password and rm -rf /'d my entire hard drive. I was probably 8 or 9 at the time and cried.
Slack was my second distro with the first one being the original Red Hat, but i discovered them on IRC, through the glorious mIRC Simpson, if any other Italian is around, back then ^^
Slackware was actually my second distro. My first one came on CD-ROM :). Bought my first ever CD-ROM drive specifically for the purpose. Yggdrasil Linux. As I recall, that was around 0.98 or 0.99, and the support for networking was a bit rough. But it's been damn near 30 years so my memory is hazy.
it's remarkable how dumb kids are (compared to adults). most people understand intuitively when talking to a child that they are going to be dumb and we need to treat them differently (or have a different standard), but the internet's anonymity shields you quite a bit and it's easy to think you're talking to a really dumb adult when really you're being a horrible person. If that person knew you were an 8 or 9 year old child I would guess they would have praised you for your curiosity, tenacity, etc.
Yeah, much like the person who seems like a dumb adult might just be an inexperienced kid, the jerk might also just be a child who hasn't learned how to get attention other than by being awful. I got bored with _intentionally_ being an asshole on the internet by the time I was 13, but that was after a few years of it.
Slackware was my first Linux distro. There was someone with a Linux box in my college dorm at the time and I looked at his desktop and awesome custom terminals, and I was hooked. I asked him how to get started and he handed me a case with Walnut Creek Slackware CDs.
Slax was my introduction both to Slackware and Linux. I miss those days. My parents don't: I think I wiped their computer a half dozen times messing with things (usually killing the MBR IIRC)
Slackware 9 was my first Linux. I knew next to nothing about computers at the time but discovered the cheapest way to get one was refurbished office machines with no OS. Another student gave me a CD and then things were difficult. Changed my life.
I had to go back and check, the first version I installed was 3.0. I'm guessing a lot of us started our Linux journey on early Slackware floppy installs.
I used Slackware for about 15 years before switching to Debian/Ubuntu; I knew a lot more about day-to-day Linux internals during the Slackware period and kind of miss it, and it may be worth trying 15 out.
"Erik "alphageek" Jan Tromp passed away in 2020 after a long illness. He was
a long-time member of the Slackware core team doing a ton of stuff behind
the scenes and a master of lesser-known programming languages like Tcl. :-)
For a long time he lived closer to me geographically than anyone else on
the core team, but unfortunately with an international border between us
we never did meet in person. But he was there in chat every day and was a
good friend to everyone on the team. He is greatly missed. Sorry I didn't
get 15.0 out in time for you to see it...
My old friend Brett Person also passed away in 2020. Without Brett, it's
possible that there wouldn't be any Slackware as we know it - he's the one
who encouraged me to upload it to FTP back in 1993 and served as Slackware's
original beta-tester. He was long considered a co-founder of this project.
I knew Brett since the days of the Beggar's Banquet BBS in Fargo back in
the 80's. When the Slackware Project moved to Walnut Creek CDROM, Brett was
hired as well, and we spent many hours on the road and sitting next to each
other representing Slackware at various trade shows. Brett seemed to know
all kinds of computer luminaries and was an amazing storyteller, always
with his smooth radio voice. Gonna miss you too, pal."
Slackware was my first linux distribution, and one that I used continuously before moving to Arch.
As it happens, I think Arch embodies many of the original Slackware principles, but its focus on more modern hardware led to it growing a larger community - one that includes great documentation.
The Arch Wiki is a treasure, I used it when setting up Slackware on a MacBook Pro because it had the most comprehensive description of the caveats and gotchas for the laptop of anywhere on the WWW.
I hear good things about Void, but last time I tried to install it, the mirror I was pulling from had the download time estimate at a couple of days, and I didn't have time to muck about that day.
Might be time to try it again - or a different mirror
That drama has ended, he was demoted from dictator. Now things are chugging along with multiple contributors like most other projects.
For me Void seems like a very good distro, I think of it as a naked kernel with runnit init and xbps as the package manager, nothing gets in the way. It also has the nice property where the git repo is the distro in every sense.
While the problem wasn’t unique, the hostile takeover of the project was. The honorable and legal course of action would be to fork.
The owner had built the distro single-handed over ten years, and GitHub and Freenode helped to eject him from his own project, over his eventual strenuous objections.
Even that link doesn’t give a balanced story. You have to track down the founder’s posts to hear his side and to understand why he had stopped contributing for awhile.
If you are happy with Arch, keep using Arch. My persnickety criteria shouldn't affect others' distro choice. But Arch's maintainers left simplicity on the table a long time ago, with a few annoying symptoms, notably:
1) Arch changes shit in massive ways resulting in huge flag days. Once every few years may be tolerable, but they tended to happen alarmingly often, requiring me to check the wiki and manually recombobulate the system. Arch's policy is pretty much update every day, and unless you hit a very narrow window to update, or even if you do, check the wiki every day and be prepared to manually recombobulate per our instructions. I'm old and cranky and my daily driver distro shouldn't need that much care. Void is designed how Arch used to be, which means I may not need to recombobulate at all, sometimes with a year or two between updates, and if I do it's much easier to do under Void.
2) Systemd. Frickin' systemd. Void is the first distro to switch from systemd to something else (runit).
I remember staying up all night downloading Slackware 96 (version 3.0) floppy sets over my 28.8kbps modem. I think I used it for my first 6+ months of home Linux use.
In retrospect it was probably a good thing to learn on because Slackware was so simple but did so little for you. I remember having to read a long HOWTO from the Linux Documentation Project about how to get XFree86 working. Hand crafting /etc/X11/XF86Config, including experimenting to find modelines that worked for my CRT monitor. Learning how to get Apache setup, which was kind of pointless but fun since I was on dialup.
And setting up auto dial up with a PPP session whenever I used anything that needed to get online. That seemed like magic!
Learned a lot there before trying out RedHat (4.x, before Enterprise was a thing) and Debian 1.3 (Bo) and then staying a Debian user for a long time until mostly moving to Ubuntu for server things.
Handcrafting XF86Config is how I spent my summer of 95. I was in engineering school in India and we have these 486s in the lab running Win 3.1. I took permission from the lab dude to install Linux/X Windows on it. Monitor I had with the 486 was some noname OEM. So naturally the frequencies or whatever in the XF86Config didn't match. For many many weeks I would randomly change numbers in a line and restart. I think it was Ctrl+Fn7 to get to X screen or terminal. Still remember the joy when I got the login screen to show up.
> including experimenting to find modelines that worked for my CRT monitor.
I remember having to muck around with modelines in X11 in the 1990s - but not this century; and even last century, Windows (both 3.x/9x and NT lineages) and OS/2 (I only ever ran 2.0) never required any such esoteric configuration (I don’t even know whether either exposed any INI/registry settings for it.) Why was this such a big (and painful) part of the 90s Linux GUI experience but not for its contemporary GUI competitors?
I recently had to look into modelines because of one issue related to high frequency refresh rate display and amdgpu causing some blinking due to VRAM reclocking. Really didn't expect that ever to come up.
In the process I discovered that KWin doesn't yet support setting video modes using modelines in the Wayland session at present.
I think monitors were tested by manufacturers on windows. Also you usually had a no name monitor and you either selected something close to what you had or a generic one and then had to play with xvidtune.
XFree86 gained EDID autodetect support later than Windows and this makes people remember issues with high-res modes longer (Windows used to have them too early on, Mac was full of custom crap, unix workstations tended to have explicit data available),
Windows around win95/nt tended to come with preselected list (and woe on you if you choose wrong!), which meant that you could just select reasonably close defaults - or if you had fancy display, it might come with windows driver (actually a parameter file) telling the available options.
Also remember that significant majority of Windows users didn't have hi-res displays in the days before windows 95, and if you were ok with standard VGA modes, you didn't have to mess much.
Personally I remember crafting custom modelines because I wanted more than standard EDID data could give me, cranking up refresh rate to ~81Hz at 1152x864 resolution or so (typical setting on the display was 1024x768)
I also started with Slack floppies, but never really thought about how much it taught me. Disk partitions, files systems, permissions, networking, drivers, etc. It really did force learning at least a base level of all aspects of the system.
I have been a generalist for most of my career and that may not have happened without Slackware.
Slackware 3.0 in the mid 90's was where I got started too.
I have an nearly 20 year old system that's been upgraded many times from 10.0, 'grep -c "^Subject: Welcome to Linux" $MAIL' indicates 10 times ;) It's been through several hardware replacements, and now exists as a VM guest, since I took the leap some years ago to Slackware64 (its host, of course) with alienbob's multilib support.
Good to see improved multilib, build from scratch/make world, and still a full 32-bit option.
I recently reformatted my personal machine from Slack 14.2 to Ubuntu, and did not have a fun time. The second time that Ubuntu randomly bricked my machine with an update, I changed tack. I'm now running Alpine Linux as my desktop, and I have to say it's absolutely a spiritual successor to Slack. Very similar installation process, very simple design, and I've had to re-learn how to set up a desktop, hardware, etc. It's been fun! It's extremely fast too. (and as a bonus: no systemd!)
last time i checked Alpine linux I had the idea that the desktop functionality was barely supported (i think the only DE available was XFCE, which is fine to me, but the install documentation seemed incomplete). I think I'll give it a try also.
I used Slackware for years in the 90's before moving to FreeBSD. I honestly thought the project was dead and moved to Arch. Sadly, I'm not coming back, but I keep fond memories.
181 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadKudos to Patrick!
This is in reference to DistroTube's Linux 2022 predictions which included "no Slackware release"
https://youtube.com/watch?v=YJMm4BXNdX4
Congratulations to the Slackware team
Can’t tell you how exhilarating it was to build a new kernel by hand, or how horrifying it was to f-up libc or some other mission critical library.
Slack is easy to pick up and easy to maintain. You may want to consider trying sbopkg or similar if you find the package manager lacking, but it's worth noting that Slackware comes with a ton of great software in the base system (libraries and daemons)
I still remember the emotion when I managed to get the system to boot and startx
Running Linux on a desktop already makes you an outlier.
Most software I want is also already installed and ready to go. Some people like to craft their OS from a minimal base, and I absolutely respect that and understand that it gives them a system which is perfectly catered to their needs - but I’m very lazy, and am perfectly happy letting someone with over 30 years experience do all that for me :-)
That being said, I use Fedora at work and wouldn’t consider using Slackware. This is because I don’t want to know anything about my underlying system as long as it works and gives me the tools I need to do my work, and because GNOME is a boon to my workflow.
It is also stable, people set up slackware servers and let it run for years.
But to be honest, modern distros are much more convenient esp for workstations. These days Slackware wouldn't be my first choice, but it brings up memories, had a lot of fun tinkering with it.
And I'm saying that as someone who barely missed the 90s on IRC as a teenager. (Although I went online with Linux in 98)
Added: 8-9 y.o. who installs Linux is smart, not dumb in my perception.
I chose Slackware and he told me I chose well and that I would be strong.
Did you re-install and continue with Slackware after that?
./configure; make; make install everything
"Erik "alphageek" Jan Tromp passed away in 2020 after a long illness. He was a long-time member of the Slackware core team doing a ton of stuff behind the scenes and a master of lesser-known programming languages like Tcl. :-) For a long time he lived closer to me geographically than anyone else on the core team, but unfortunately with an international border between us we never did meet in person. But he was there in chat every day and was a good friend to everyone on the team. He is greatly missed. Sorry I didn't get 15.0 out in time for you to see it...
My old friend Brett Person also passed away in 2020. Without Brett, it's possible that there wouldn't be any Slackware as we know it - he's the one who encouraged me to upload it to FTP back in 1993 and served as Slackware's original beta-tester. He was long considered a co-founder of this project. I knew Brett since the days of the Beggar's Banquet BBS in Fargo back in the 80's. When the Slackware Project moved to Walnut Creek CDROM, Brett was hired as well, and we spent many hours on the road and sitting next to each other representing Slackware at various trade shows. Brett seemed to know all kinds of computer luminaries and was an amazing storyteller, always with his smooth radio voice. Gonna miss you too, pal."
(I also used Yggdrasil, but always ran it from CD and never installed it to a hard drive.)
As it happens, I think Arch embodies many of the original Slackware principles, but its focus on more modern hardware led to it growing a larger community - one that includes great documentation.
These days I don't know what they're doing, but Void is basically Arch without the bullshit (and with runit instead of systemd, thank goodness).
Might be time to try it again - or a different mirror
Same problem as any other project with a single owner, or even a small team. It is at risk of disappearing one day, never to be heard from again.
There are a lot of important projects that fall into this category. It certainly isn't unique to Void.
For me Void seems like a very good distro, I think of it as a naked kernel with runnit init and xbps as the package manager, nothing gets in the way. It also has the nice property where the git repo is the distro in every sense.
The owner had built the distro single-handed over ten years, and GitHub and Freenode helped to eject him from his own project, over his eventual strenuous objections.
https://www.michaelwashere.net/post/2018-11-28-enobdfl/
Even that link doesn’t give a balanced story. You have to track down the founder’s posts to hear his side and to understand why he had stopped contributing for awhile.
1) Arch changes shit in massive ways resulting in huge flag days. Once every few years may be tolerable, but they tended to happen alarmingly often, requiring me to check the wiki and manually recombobulate the system. Arch's policy is pretty much update every day, and unless you hit a very narrow window to update, or even if you do, check the wiki every day and be prepared to manually recombobulate per our instructions. I'm old and cranky and my daily driver distro shouldn't need that much care. Void is designed how Arch used to be, which means I may not need to recombobulate at all, sometimes with a year or two between updates, and if I do it's much easier to do under Void.
2) Systemd. Frickin' systemd. Void is the first distro to switch from systemd to something else (runit).
In retrospect it was probably a good thing to learn on because Slackware was so simple but did so little for you. I remember having to read a long HOWTO from the Linux Documentation Project about how to get XFree86 working. Hand crafting /etc/X11/XF86Config, including experimenting to find modelines that worked for my CRT monitor. Learning how to get Apache setup, which was kind of pointless but fun since I was on dialup.
And setting up auto dial up with a PPP session whenever I used anything that needed to get online. That seemed like magic!
Learned a lot there before trying out RedHat (4.x, before Enterprise was a thing) and Debian 1.3 (Bo) and then staying a Debian user for a long time until mostly moving to Ubuntu for server things.
I remember having to muck around with modelines in X11 in the 1990s - but not this century; and even last century, Windows (both 3.x/9x and NT lineages) and OS/2 (I only ever ran 2.0) never required any such esoteric configuration (I don’t even know whether either exposed any INI/registry settings for it.) Why was this such a big (and painful) part of the 90s Linux GUI experience but not for its contemporary GUI competitors?
In the process I discovered that KWin doesn't yet support setting video modes using modelines in the Wayland session at present.
Windows around win95/nt tended to come with preselected list (and woe on you if you choose wrong!), which meant that you could just select reasonably close defaults - or if you had fancy display, it might come with windows driver (actually a parameter file) telling the available options.
Also remember that significant majority of Windows users didn't have hi-res displays in the days before windows 95, and if you were ok with standard VGA modes, you didn't have to mess much.
Personally I remember crafting custom modelines because I wanted more than standard EDID data could give me, cranking up refresh rate to ~81Hz at 1152x864 resolution or so (typical setting on the display was 1024x768)
I have been a generalist for most of my career and that may not have happened without Slackware.
I have an nearly 20 year old system that's been upgraded many times from 10.0, 'grep -c "^Subject: Welcome to Linux" $MAIL' indicates 10 times ;) It's been through several hardware replacements, and now exists as a VM guest, since I took the leap some years ago to Slackware64 (its host, of course) with alienbob's multilib support.
Good to see improved multilib, build from scratch/make world, and still a full 32-bit option.
Apache/httpd: 2.4.52
Mysql: 10.5.13
PHP: 7.4.27
Source: ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware64-15.0/PACKAGES.TXT