Live data from Hacker News

Slackware Live Edition

alien.slackbook.org

51–60 of 61 posts

Re: Slackware Live Edition

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was "a bit" older when I picked up a copy of Slackware back in '95. I was working doing C development on a number of *nix and other platforms (most of which are gone now), and needed something better for working from home than a 16 bit compiler on MS-DOS. Slackware felt MUCH more powerful than the SCO x86 OS we had at work, and having a desktop GUI was just gravy, rather than worrying about anything being "ready fo…

Delicious irony 20 years later: the mobile era. Apple, yet again, makes really good devices. However, the most numerous devices are now Linux/Android. Now we have to ask "Is Microsoft ready for mobile", but it's too late, and the answer is "nobody cares". God, it feels so good to watch Linux kick the crap out of MS, after all those years of putting up with their slow/buggy OS's and development torment-ware.

Well yes but my Android phone (Nexus 4) really feels like Windows 98 though : security is an illusion and it crashes (reboot) for no apparent reason (I believe it doesn't like to be put in Airplane Mode while I sleep).

Let's not talk about my desktop Linux experience which is not stellar either.

Honestly if it weren't for the telemetry updates I'd be a happy Windows user.

I didn't mention Apple since I can't afford what they think people should pay for their devices.

Re: Slackware Live Edition

#52
post #29

i tried many times to convince myself that i can live without automatic package dependencies but failed i love the legacy of slackware, the brand but its more of an emotional thing at the end, i use kubuntu, ubuntu based distros have access to ppa(s) which really make life a lot easier for linux on the desktop hopefully one day slackware will give up and add automatic management for package dependencies but until tha…

I used Slackware for several years as my main desktop machine. I never ran into dependency issues. You have to understand that the Debian et al approach of having dozens of small packages for everything you want to install is not universal.

I have often read "I don't have the time for Slackware." In all honesty, I spent way less time on the OS with Slackware. The quality was much higher, there was never a need to wait months for a bug fix because someone forgot to link something in, and it was really easy to build my own packages.

I eventually left because slackbuilds.org was not being run very well and I couldn't get the packages I needed. But the dependency issue was not a concern at all.

Re: Slackware Live Edition

#53
post #29

i tried many times to convince myself that i can live without automatic package dependencies but failed i love the legacy of slackware, the brand but its more of an emotional thing at the end, i use kubuntu, ubuntu based distros have access to ppa(s) which really make life a lot easier for linux on the desktop hopefully one day slackware will give up and add automatic management for package dependencies but until tha…

I used Slackware for several years as my main desktop machine. I never ran into dependency issues. You have to understand that the Debian et al approach of having dozens of small packages for everything you want to install is not universal. I have often read "I don't have the time for Slackware." In all honesty, I spent way less time on the OS with Slackware. The quality was much higher, there was never a need to wai…

> I eventually left because slackbuilds.org was not being run very well and I couldn't get the packages I needed

I'd be interested to hear more about that if you're willing to share. Let's see if we can do something positive to fix it, even if it's too late to help you personally.

Re: Slackware Live Edition

#54
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also make rsyslog work on windows, doesn't mean it's supported or encouraged.. people seem to have this analogue of "you can configure away the bad bits" but in the end the bad bits are orthogonal to it's design and 'bypassing' them or hacking around them should not be encouraged- it should be able to be done by default.

> people seem to have this analogue of "you can configure away the bad bits" Where in my comment did I imply that the journal was "bad"? The journal is awesome . But if you have some workflow designed around syslog, such as a log analyzer or statistics package that you don't want to tweak, text logging still works just fine.

"bad" is just a metaphor in this context

Re: Slackware Live Edition

#55
post #29

i tried many times to convince myself that i can live without automatic package dependencies but failed i love the legacy of slackware, the brand but its more of an emotional thing at the end, i use kubuntu, ubuntu based distros have access to ppa(s) which really make life a lot easier for linux on the desktop hopefully one day slackware will give up and add automatic management for package dependencies but until tha…

I'm using slackware (full install) with sbopkg and slackpkg+, and I needed to run a dependency check only once, when a package I already had installed from sbopkg had a new dependency. All other times (2 years) I haven't run in any issue with dependencies, not even once.

Re: Slackware Live Edition

#56
post #11

How does Slackware compare to ArchLinux? They both seem to be very barebones and force you to learn more about Linux, but ArchLinux seems much more popular from what I gather.

I've been using Arch for two years before going back to Slackware. It was a good run, Arch is fun and easy to use and everything works very, very well. On the same laptop is even faster than Slackware (I did not run any test, it was just my perception after a fresh install... maybe because Arch has way less packages...).

BUT Arch brokes often. Even when I look the news on the official website or search the forums for issues with recent updates, even when I check that everything is ok accordin to the (awesome, really awesome) docs, Arch brokes something.

I grew reluctant to run "pacman -Syu". Now with Slackware I am 100% sure that my system will always work after every update, and if it doesn't work is because a simple new dependency that I can install in a couple of minutes if I want, or I simply keep the already installed package without any issues whatsoever.

Re: Slackware Live Edition

#57
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used Slackware for several years as my main desktop machine. I never ran into dependency issues. You have to understand that the Debian et al approach of having dozens of small packages for everything you want to install is not universal. I have often read "I don't have the time for Slackware." In all honesty, I spent way less time on the OS with Slackware. The quality was much higher, there was never a need to wai…

> I eventually left because slackbuilds.org was not being run very well and I couldn't get the packages I needed I'd be interested to hear more about that if you're willing to share. Let's see if we can do something positive to fix it, even if it's too late to help you personally.

The biggest thing was that SlackBuilds weren't being updated for the new release. There was also some unfriendliness in the mailing list related to getting it fixed (in general, nothing I experienced). I don't remember exactly what it was though. This was quite a while back - probably 13.1 or 13.37.

Re: Slackware Live Edition

#58
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I eventually left because slackbuilds.org was not being run very well and I couldn't get the packages I needed I'd be interested to hear more about that if you're willing to share. Let's see if we can do something positive to fix it, even if it's too late to help you personally.

The biggest thing was that SlackBuilds weren't being updated for the new release. There was also some unfriendliness in the mailing list related to getting it fixed (in general, nothing I experienced). I don't remember exactly what it was though. This was quite a while back - probably 13.1 or 13.37.

Thanks. FYI, for the upcoming 14.2 release we have an officially unofficial repo with hundreds of fixes for 14.2 ready to go (and hundreds more needed).

I'll admit I get a little tetchy when people insist on telling me 'xxx is broken on -current' when I already know exactly which 400+ packages are broken, and when everybody should understand that -current is for beta testers.

Re: Slackware Live Edition

#60
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved from Slackware to Kubuntu too, but as I recall Slack had something - maybe slackpkg - that did dependency installation. I jumped ship for the breadth of packages available and automatic kernel module compilation (I forget what it's called at the moment; recompiling nvidia video modules was getting to be a pain and I needed to keep the family computer online consistently).

slackpkg doesn't do dependencies. slapt-get ( http://software.jaos.org/ ) does, but it needs repo that has dependency metadata. Official repos don't have it. If a repository doesn't have dependency metadata then slapt-get doesn't resolve deps for that set of packages. Some other repos (AlienBob's for instance) do have dependency metadata, which assume that you did a full Slackware install, so only dependencies that a…

slpkg is worth a look:

https://github.com/dslackw/slpkg

Post reply on HN