171–180 of 182 posts
Funny part is now I do a very basic Slackware install that setup pkgsrc (https://pkgsrc.org) on it so I can really experience the best and worst of times!
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Slackware is a no frills distro and arguably the baseline for all linux distros. It’s appealing because of the lack of magic or distro specific customizations. If you want a distro that just lets you do what you need to do without getting in the way, it’s very appealing. If you want a distro that prevents you from shooting yourself in the foot, look elsewhere.
> that prevents you from shooting yourself in the foot, look elsewhere. I remember having to re-run the installation many times, from selecting the wrong options during installation.
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Slackware is really a small/bare bones distro, "old schoolers" like it because in it's time (90s era) just having a Unix like system on a PC was amazing and it is considered very stable, now that GNU/Linux is everywhere today's distros are just easier to use.
> There is no formal issue tracking system and no official procedure to become a code contributor or developer. The project does not maintain a public code repository. Bug reports and contributions, while being essential to the project, are managed in an informal way. All the final decisions about what is going to be included in a Slackware release strictly remain with Slackware's benevolent dictator for life, Patric…
They have steadfastly refused to move to more 'modern' development practices (they have been arguing about it since the mid 90s). With simple things like issue tracking. That is fine, it works for them. But after a few years I got tired of spinning my own just to have something kind of current (think that has changed). But I bailed out, when they kicked out the dudes who made it into a distro that was easier to update with some simple commands (like apt). That is something OS at the time had but them. I gave up. I just moved onto whatever my employer decided we were going to use (usually redhat or debian based). I enjoyed my time using it, but it became a chore to maintain. So I moved on to things that had automated some of that. They may have even fixed some of the issues I had with them. But I no longer have the time to bother going back.
I have seen this pattern with a few projects. Basically whoever runs the project just does not want to mess with it. That is fine. But it really holds their project back. It works fine when you have 1-2 people working on it. But you add a few dozen with people dipping in and out randomly you need to add some control to the chaos. One project I watched the main dev go kicking and screaming how it would not help. The project is now clicking along pretty good. He now does not feel like he is all alone fighting the world. He has people to help him and can track it easily. He even stated he should have done it sooner.
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'…
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What history is that and why does it matter today?
https://voidlinux.org/news/2018/05/serious-issues.html 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.
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.
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/XF86Co…
Slackware was my first distro, purchased a diskette set by mail from a company in Computer Shopper magazine and installed it on a 386 my parents gave me after buying an IBM PS/1 with a 486DX2 in 1991 (or 1992?). I used it to get Internet access via SLIP dial-up to a mainframe at the University of Missouri and from there to play MUDs which ended up becoming an obsession for years and resulted in me learning C to modif…
Funny, my first computer was an IBM PS/1 that I got for Christmas of 1992. I couldn't figure out how to install linux on it. Googling now I see someone talking about the hard disk controller being on the mobo and unsupported, and someone saying they had to supply hard disk geometry info. That was beyond me as a pre-teen. Didn't get my first box to install slackware on until I traded two BB guns for a tower PC as a te…
A handful of years later my parents bought a Dell running Windows 98 SE and I built my first custom computer which had an AMD K6-2 and also ran Windows so I could play computer games (which at the time were more interesting to me) and it also had the just released Diamond Monster3D based on the Voodoo2 chipset w/ separate 2D accelerator card via VGA passthru. That was my first foray into proper 3D gaming and got me interested in hardware and overclocking, which dominated most of my interest until my later teen years when I started contributing to open source and got back into Linux.
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Arch embodied many of the original Slackware principles, once. 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).
What bullshit are you referring to? Void sure seems like an interesting alternative, but I am happy with Arch atm so I have not tried it yet.
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).
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Initially, back in the early 1990's I think it was the only "distribution" of Linux out there. It was either download Slackware to 3.5" floppies, or else hand-roll your own distribution completely from scratch. I think RedHat came along in the mid to late 90's. I jumped ship and never looked back, because RPM packages were so much more convenient then Slackware's hodgepodge of configure scripts and makefiles. Ubuntu…
> Ubuntu then came along in the 2000's, around the time that RedHat got bought by IBM IBM bought Red Hat only three years ago.