161–170 of 182 posts
Unreadable on mobile. Unreadable in reader mode on mobile. That takes talent. But not the kind of talent we can celebrate. They wrapped the whole wall of text in a PRE tag, which is user hostile and a poor way to use HTML. We solved this back in the early 1990s.
I would not call it "solved". Slackware home page is usable. The modern web is a usability disaster.
My very first linux distro :)
Also my first. Feel like it was included with some book/magazine, but then started buying copies from Walnut Creek software. 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.
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 t…
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.
As someone who is from the era of Ubuntu as their first distro, my natural progression towards maintainable OS made me reach Arch. As an OS for your system, it seems like the perfect abstraction layer and does just enough. The next incremental update to my system could be NixOS, Nix package manager in Arch or Nix package manager in FreeBSD. But I am always happy to see old projects like this kicking. I see many peopl…
I considered Slackware but I'm under the impression it has no analogue to apt or dnf/yum. How on earth do people running Slackware manage their library dependencies and keep everything up to date?
Cheers and congrats to Pat and team
Besides that initial confusion, once it is up and working, it is remarkably minimal, clean, elegant, and with very up-to date packages (if you use "-current"). I love that package management does not install recursive dependencies. It is my smaller testing VM and feels just as fast as the others, and never gives me any trouble.
I'm a Slackware user (as a "pet" testing machine) and one of the things that bothers me about this distribution is that I don't know which packages I'm supposed to install. For example, by default it wants me to install both lilo and grub, but only one of them seems to be necessary. Is that alright? Do I need to select my packages manually from the long list? Besides that initial confusion, once it is up and working,…
As someone who is from the era of Ubuntu as their first distro, my natural progression towards maintainable OS made me reach Arch. As an OS for your system, it seems like the perfect abstraction layer and does just enough. The next incremental update to my system could be NixOS, Nix package manager in Arch or Nix package manager in FreeBSD. But I am always happy to see old projects like this kicking. I see many peopl…
I considered Slackware but I'm under the impression it has no analogue to apt or dnf/yum. How on earth do people running Slackware manage their library dependencies and keep everything up to date?
slackpkg update
slackpkg upgrade-all
As for dependencies, as long as a new version does not add a new dependency, you are good. But changing dependencies of a software package is a major change that should not happen automatically. Recursive "dependency resolution" is a disgusting practice that has no place in a sane world. Dependencies are part of the API: changing dependencies is supposed to break your package, unless you do something about it.
In practice, in the rare case when this happens, you will not get any warning when upgrading. But you will get an error when running your program (that has become broken because of a missing dependency). The error message will be very clear, something like:
"Runtime error: libfoo not found"
slackpkg install libfooEarlier quoted context omitted.
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 ol…
The other person could also have been 8 or 9. In fact, I was doing dumb things to strangers on the internet well into my teenage years.
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)