Why Slackware Rocks !!!

[nickbarkus]

Hi all,
Newbie to slackware . Earlier i was using ubuntu but beacuse of the peformance perblems someone suggested the best distro on earth - SALCKWARE - to try . WOllA slackware is much faster then ubuntu on my 650 MHZ AMD Athlon 192 MB RAM. Apart from performance i would like to know what other feature make the salckware best . Just wanna know what good experince u have with slackware .

Thanking in advance.

[daark.child]

I used Slack for a couple of years. The good thing I like it was simplicity and the fact that they left packages as the developers meant them to be (many distros heavily patch the kernel, kde, gnome etc). The main reason why I ended up dropping it as my main distro was the packaging system. The more I used Slack, the more I got to dislike the packaging tools. In terms of performance, I suspect you could have stripped down Ubuntu or installed a lighter desktop or window manager and it could have performed better on your system.

[devils casper]

I agree with daark.child. I dropped Slackware coz of same reason. Earlier version of slackware couldn't even detect my mouse.
Have you tried Debian Netinstall + any Window manager Or Xfce?

[genesus]

I also agree with the above posters. I don't mind, though, if a distro doesn't detect my hardware upon install, that's not much of an issue for me to resolve; however, the lack of a good package management system for slackware led me to use debian. Resolving dependencies before compiling a tarball or installing a binary can be a drag when you have to manually do it with EVERYTHING. Apt, ports and portage cures that!

[Dapper Dan]

I guess I'm one of the few. Package management was never a problem for me in Slackware. Slapt-get worked well. For system upgrade, Dropline Gnome did a good job. CruxPorts4Slack (which led me to Crux) installed many packages on my Slackware boxes and solved dependencies to boot. And Slackware packages from LinuxPackages.net were easy to install. It didn't bother me in the least to use different sources for package management.

You're justified to be excited with Slackware. It's a really good, rock solid distro.

[nickbarkus]

few question are popping in my head like :
1) package in the linuxpackages.net etc are not the part of the slackware. Are these good enough to be installed on ur system . Here if we talk abt ubuntu all most all of the packages are provided by ubuntu and relying on external source is less .
2)having a simple package management that even do not look for dependency ( here not talking abt slap-get etc) what is the advantage that u get with it . can anyone put some light on this.
3)customization is a pillar of slackware ( what i have heard ) i want to know can u achieve same level of customization from ubuntu etc.

Installing ubuntu or its variants is out of question . what i have noticed is that when u install any of the upgrades ubuntu performance drops further 10-15%.Yup apt-get is a superb.

[Freston]

If you're running Slackware you will get used to people NOT liking your distro of choice

It's not .. eh .. well .. people love it or hate it :-p

Yeah, linuxpackages are as good as any. You'll need to track dependencies though, of ignore them. You can safely ignore many packages, and you'll notice soon enough if you did wrong.

You can make your own packages from source with makepkg. If you do this, you'll find you can easily switch package versions or try out different compilation options.

Customizing Ubuntu is possible of course, but it's process is the other way around.
Slackware gives you the tools, but not the features and services. You have to turn everything on manually and build your system from there.
Ubuntu gives you the features and services, but not the tools. And you have to turn everything off that you don't need.

[genesus]

DapperDan,

I had some success with slapt-get; however, I think I kept messing things up with emerde...fitting name,

[Dapper Dan]

I had some success with slapt-get; however, I think I kept messing things up with emerde...fitting name,

I tried it too with similar results! I think emerde must have been a big practical joke on Slackware users! It certainly lived up to its name! lol...

[Gtrax]

I have recently been able to compare package management from Slack-based distros to Debian's apt-get and dpkg implemented together as the excellent 'Synaptic'. The Slack-based tools vary some (slapt-get, gslapt, Zenwalk's netpkg. Also, Gentoo's Portage, SUSE's YAST, and Fedora/RedHat RPM. Of course, there is some cross-contamination here, there being more package managers than package distribution formats. Some of these need cute trickery in combination with other tools to manage dependencies.

All can be made pretty seamless, but I found SUSE's the slowest, and not enough choice where I needed it. Back in the days of 9.3, a boxed SuSE set had all you could wish for. Then suddenly the policy changed. I never expected more than server software and Office-type applications out of SLED, but in the end, I tired of problems around 10.1, and went Ubuntu.

Ubuntu works like Debian, and has a more or less inflexible repository set that is derived from, but usually incompatible with Debian. Don't expect a Debian package to work OK with Ubuntu. I left Ubuntu because of the strong version-dependent nature. When the version changes, so does what you can run. Even Kubuntu, and Xubuntu have their very own version. You just have to stay with the official repositories, and take what is there.

Easily the biggest, and nicest to use is Debian's. Getting a Debian desktop up and matching what some other distros set up out of the box is not so easy, but in my view worth it. I fell in love with Synaptic. Installing a modern fully featured electronics design suite compiled from the CD is not too difficult, but Debian was the only place where I could just click on a gimme list, and just have it happen.

Redhats RPMs I have not used much. Arguably, I did not give them a fair shake. I think the package management from a Fedora environment is quite fine, if not as slick as Synaptic, and the choice is good. There were other aspects to Fedora functionality that put me off.

You can never discuss package management without mentioning Gentoo. It has less relevance for most because Gentoo is a all-compiled, optimised, source-based distro that is the minority territory of power-computing geeks who would roll their own. Portage is invoked from the command line with 'emerge', and when used in anger is just simply awesome. The availability of the latest and greatest has always been impressive, but has slowed somewhat recently, because it depends on folk donating their effort. Once built, Gentoo is versionless. It is always the very latest, but I can't use it for everyday stuff. Its laziness maybe, but a few seconds from Synaptic has to be set against a compile experience for every package.