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by stinkytaco 4614 days ago
In case you are not trolling:

1. Everything is as close to the upstream package as possible. Debian maintainers sometimes heavily modify their packages and that makes finding help difficult. Slackware rarely changes their packages or only does if necessary.

2. Package manager does not do dependency checking. This makes installing packages from source easier because I don't have to worry about breaking the system when compiling. If something breaks, it's easy to know what to roll back.

3. Good for understanding the innards of Linux. There are no distro specific config tools or non-standard setups. Packages may come with them, but they are standard and well documented. Good way to understand what's going on.

EDIT: I thought of one more:

4. Documentation. Patrick's documentation is great. If you have no other tools, you could get Slackware setup just reading his documents.

All said, Slackware is a throwback to when distros were just a quick way to get a Linux system running, not OSes in and of themselves. If you took each piece and compiled it yourself, you'd get Slackware. That's pretty cool.

But seriously, that's the beauty of Linux. You go ahead and use Arch or Debian. Absolutely no one is going to stop you. But someone using Slackware has zero negative effect on you.

3 comments

I'm not trying to counter your argument because you're totally right, but Arch pretty much exactly matches Slackware on points 1, 3 and 4.
Depends on the packages - in AUR land where people thing it is GREAT idea of cloning the git repo instead of some fixed revision there are many times when trying to build something you see

hunk XX of something failed, aborting.

Yeah but that's under point 2, which I left out. :D
This thread made me think. Perhaps Slackware is due for a slight comeback due to the ZFS style snapshot / containerization type trends going on right now, since Slackware's quirk of "not having" package management becomes irrelevant.
Linux From Scratch?