Slackware 14.1 is released

As others have pointed out, Slackware does indeed have an excellent package manager and even slackbuilds, a package depository of sorts. The slackware package manager does not do dependency checking, however. I see this as a good thing because I've broken things by compiling from source on Debian. Slackbuilds is quite helpful and provides most needed dependencies for you to compile first.

>I never knew if it was the founders/dev's (I think was only 1 at the time) own attitude but seriously, slackware attracted idiots like honey bees.

There's still only one and he's fairly hands off when it comes to the community. No one hears much from Pat and he does what he and his small team wants. So it's not the founder that's driving that attitude. I've actually found the slackware community to be one of the most open and helpful around. Check their forums and linuxquestions.org.

All these slackware haters! Go back to heroku, lusers. Glad to see slackware is still kickin', still have fond memories of my first linux install :>

Amen. I can't believe what people do for free, and that OSS has taken off at all. While there's room in this world for all kinds, my soul dies a little when someone comments, "wow, kids these days are so smart with computers!" While they watch them install iPhoto off the App Store.

It's not true, but there will always be awesome people with awesome ideas and be willing to share them with the community. It's like http://bedrocklinux.org/ Damned if I need to use it, but it's awesome that someone is pushing boundaries like that. Or CoreOS, or Docker, or Debian, or Sugar (OLPC)... It just goes on. Be a hacker, and enjoy life. Loud people are everywhere, but it's the quiet ones in the corner doing the cool work.

Usually people are skeptical about Slackware package manager (slackpkg). I thought I'd just throw in some links to alternatives. If you want to try another package manager you can install it and start using it in under one minute. Package manager is a package just like any other :)

One is slapt-get [0], supports third party repos, resolves dependencies if you use it with repos that have dependency metadata, if you really really must :) Salix repos are a nice source of extra packages, and have dependency metadata. You'll have to wait a bit for them to upgrade to 14.1.

Another nice package manager is slackroll[1]. This one doesn't do dependencies, but has other nice options.

For slackuilds (build script repo, like BSD ports) you can use sbopkg [2] or sport [3], both are nice.

Have fun.

[0] http://software.jaos.org/#slapt-get [1] http://rg3.github.io/slackroll/ [2] http://sbopkg.org/ [3] http://slackermedia.info/sport/

UPDATE: I think there's a lot more to a distro than just a package manager, and these tools might help someone. Of course you'll probably get most stuff you need out of the box, some others from slackbuilds.org.

Slackware pkgtools (installpkg, upgradepkg, removepkg) are really simple, manpage for each is under 2 screens of text, and they really get out of the way, and never betray you.

Further, init system is classic sysvinit with rc style scripts in /etc/rc.d and it supports normal SysV scripts like other distros, in /etc/init.d. No pulseaudio out of the box (it's available on slackbuilds.org if you want it). You can disable NetworkManager and install WICD from /extra in no time, and it's not gonna magically re-enable itself later.