Well I have been bouncing around a little with different distro's lately. But my favorite so far is Arch Linux. I really do like Pacman. I have already looked into the why's and such on why Arch is just faster then anything else for me. So no need to get into all of that in this thread.

I am currently using Sabayon. I like it, nothing at all wrong with it but it is not what I want. Arch ruined other distro's for me, lol.

But... I have also been hearing great things about Slackware.

I am planning on installing Arch but I am wondering if I should try Slackware first.

So my question boils down to the package management of the two. Which one do you like better and why?


Edit: Distrowatch has TXZ as Slackware package management, is this correct? I never used Slackware so I don't know.

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Yet another useless poll.
Just try it yourself, you are the only judge for this.

Kind regards

My experience is limited to Slackware and derivatives, Fedora & Co., and FreeBSD. I intend to try Arch one of these days as it is has an awful reputation. Nevertheless, Slackware's pkgtools are quite unique in that they do not resolve or care about dependencies. You may think of it as:

# cd /
# tar xvf appname-version_no-arch.t?z

However, the packages are still cleverly organized by the pkgtool. It is not a dump tool, but you may tune it to do the most absurd things if you want to as it is written in shell.

The emphasis is on simplicity, and frankly, I cannot imagine a faster packaging tool. Do not consider the dependency limitation as a limitation. If you follow a default installation, then all your dependencies are there. For extra packages, you will will need sbopkg and slackbuilds.org. They also handle dependencies via third party queue files in git repos.

Chris

Not really. The Slackware package tools are called pkgtool. It is an ncurses tool that may used on a VT. Or else you may install via slackpkg or directly in CLI:

# installpkg appname-version_no-arch.t?z

The packages may be *.tgz, *.tbz or *.txz and they are all zipped tarballs.

1 members found this post helpful.

And yet another useless reply.

Thanks. I did get it wrong. After I made this "useless" poll I did more research and came across a few things about Slackware package management that made me wonder.

Thanks again for clarifying that for me.

Personally, I prefer Arch's way, but that's mostly because I'm too lazy to figure out and handle dependencies myself.
Even then, I tend to use a 3rd party wrapper for AUR integration.

Automatic Dependency checking is over-rated. For Slackware we do not cater for dependencies, because they are all installed be default. For third party packages created by SlackBuilds, the dependencies are documented in the README, and there are people maintaining queue files for every package in a specific repo (sbopkg.org). These are needed mostly for GNOME packages, that can drive you crazy if you try to follow the dependencies manually.

Chris

That may be so, and during the short time I got on with Slackware I'll grant it makes some things easier - but on the whole, where Arch seemed to prefer keeping to only what's necessary to make it work and leave everything else in opt-depends, it's fairly close to that, and IMO a nice way out for those who don't want to do dependencies.

Download Salix64-13.1.2-Xfce and give it a try,
Amdx2_x64. You'll like it, I think.

Pacman, but I'm flexible.

Happy Holidays!