distro with out its own extras?
 

I know most (if not all) linux distros come packaged with their own extras functions/programs or their own ways of doing certain tasks such as upgrades, package management, root tasks etc. For instance Debian has apt-get, Gentoo has portage, Ubuntu has sudo, Redhat has rpm.
Here's my question: Is there a linux distro that doesn't include it's own extra functions or methodologies that isn't also common in all the other distros?

Just curious

-fisher

for reference, here is the tread that got me thinking about this:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=338251

if i understand your question correctly, i think you are asking which would be the most vanilla-flavored binary distro... IMHO that would be slackware... everything is kept as vanilla as possible and basically the only "slackware thing" it comes with is the package tools... having said that, the slackware package system is simply gzipped binary tarballs, a methodology which isn't completely alien to any distro on the planet...

ofcourse if you want to go vanilla extreme, then theres allways LFS, but thats another story of its own.. And thats the closestr you can get. Afterall, there is no standard of thinking, so there cannot be a distro that wouldnt have even a single feature that the author thought was better a solution than the rest. Slackware is pretty close, but it also has its own peculiarities like the KISS approach, and the "we dont need no stinking deps" attitude we all love so much.. (:

A distro is a work of art, one that doesnt specialise in something isnt worth existing.. Slackware is close, so close that im totally in love with it.. It has just the peculiarities that suit my needs..

Aanyways, gona stop now before I go too poetic and too offtopic.. (;

If you want something totally free of even package management apps, you can always go the LFS way. I think this might be what you are thinking about.

My question isn't really about package management apps/methods specifically. For instance, something peculuar to Ubuntu is the use of 'sudo'. In Ubuntu there is no root user exactly. ALL admin level stuff is done by the use of the sudo command. Another distro specific pecularity i can think of is Sorcerer with it's special 'cast' and other wizardy commands.
I'm not familar with the term vanilla that y'all are using.

http://graduates.ubs.com/career/glos...ossary.shtml#V

slackware is mostly a vanilla-flavored distro... take the kernel, for example... slackware uses an unpatched kernel from http://www.kernel.org unlike most distros which tend to patch - sometimes heavily...

also, the slackware maintainer (patrick volkerding) goes out of his way to not interfere with any packages' defaults unless it's necessary... in other words, the kde you get is as the kde.org folks would have intended you to have it, it's not some slackware-branded kde, for example... the same idea applies to all the slackware packages...

Thanks a lot. I really haven't been interested in Slackware until reading this. I'm not sure I'm ready to try it yet.
Any other comments are welcome.

Whats stopping you?
Fear of not having something that will hold you hand?
At least with Slack if something goes wrong its YOUR fault, not slack itself. Thats what i love about it, i mean if i use apt-get, pacman, emerge etc and it hoses my system it really drives me insane, if something has a option that option should damn well work, but if something goes wrong with slack i just take a deep breath and go back through my days tinkering and solve the problem and of course LEARN!!!, so that problem wont happen again.

Don't be afraid to try Slack. It's not nearly as "difficult" as many try to make it out to be.

While it doesn't come with a lot of GUI tools to configure everything automatically for you, it also isn't that hard to get everything configured either.

Slack definately lacks a lot of the quirky "tools" and "features" of a lot of the distros aimed for newbies, but it's also among the most stable distros out there. See a connection here?

Give it a try, you may find you really like it. Or not. LOL

I'm not so much afraid, it's just that I don't have the time to mess with getting everything set up at the moment.