Discussion: Why Slackware Will Always Matter

This thread is to discuss the article titled:
WHY SLACKWARE WILL ALWAYS MATTER

WHY SLACKWARE WILL ALWAYS MATTER By Jibril Hambel Released under a Creative Commons (Attrib-NonCommerical-No Derivs 2.5) license. Several months ago, some gormless weasel from somewhere stirred up a fuss when he wrote an essay on one of the Nixer sites asking whether the Slackware distro mattered any longer. Its not really worth googling to find the author and the site where it ran, since it seems to have created an inadvertent meme in the Linux community as advocates, fanboys and editorial writers picked up upon the concept of Slackware 'mattering.' Misguided and myopic as the essay was, it certainly provoked a reaction. For a number of very good reasons, the question stuck in many a craw, and triggered a defensive barrage of articles telling the clueless author just why Slack remains a vital distro and a necessary flavor option in the distro hit list, despite the fact that most other distros are moving on to DVD size releases and trying to outrace each other to be latest and greatest.

For deity's sake I'll let go of commenting on the first and last paragraph as it IMNSHO doesn't do nothing but distract from the essence of your article and set a certain tone of voice.


derivative projects
So which are the ones Slack contributes to the benefit of the greater GNU/Linux community?


Before the Linus Torvald's bombshell expressing his disdain for the Gnome desktop environment, Slack had already jettisoned the desktop favorite. For different reasons perhaps, but it showed the Linux fold that some distros were not afraid to dump what no longer worked well enough, rather than cave into contemporary traditions and competitive habits.
"no longer worked well enough": as in who's (objective) criteria in the Slack-verse?


The fact that its the same person who began the distro in 1992-3 means that the cerebral archive of Slack wisdom is more unified and holistic than 'thousand developer' systems.
Quantify that in an objective way, please?


The simplicity of design and structure tends to provide speed to even antique machines, since the idea of cruft and bloat is a non-issue.
Idem dito.


What makes it such an important distro in the first decade of the 21st century are words like non-competitive, anti-trendy, slightly arrogant and extremely hackerish.
With all due respect, these are your own interpretations, not facts. If they are, please quote authoritative sources (yes, in your case that would mean you probably can only quote only one man).


Slack doesn't even offer a dependency handler in its own brand of package management.
People who are supposed to handle loads of production boxen may call it distracting or even "inefficient", and BTW, since you already stated yourself you spent time in "dependency hell", do you really think you should market that as an advantage for using Slack?

Originally Posted by unSpawn For deity's sake I'll let go of commenting on the first and last paragraph as it IMNSHO doesn't do nothing but distract from the essence of your article and set a certain tone of voice.

You're right. It isn't the most un-biased article I've ever read. Then again, most of these things usually are. It doesn't matter what distro they focus on. They're usually pointless fanbois drivel.

Originally Posted by unSpawn derivative projects So which are the ones Slack contributes to the benefit of the greater GNU/Linux community?

What is that supposed to mean? Do you understand what is meant by the term "derivative project?"

Unlike many other commercial Linuxes, Slackware is always available for free download. The whole distribution. 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Other distros don't release a complete free (as in $) version. Some will only release a free version after their paid-for version has been on sale for several months.

Originally Posted by unSpawn "no longer worked well enough": as in who's (objective) criteria in the Slack-verse?

I got the impression by reading the changelogs that Pat dropped GNOME because it was becoming too large and ungainly for one man to package. In his own words:

"it does usually need to be fixed and polished beyond the way it ships from upstream more so than, say, KDE or XFce ... GNOME is and always has been a moving target (even the "stable" releases usually aren't quite ready yet) that really does demand a team to keep up on all the changes (many of which are not always well documented)."

Originally Posted by unSpawn The fact that its the same person who began the distro in 1992-3 means that the cerebral archive of Slack wisdom is more unified and holistic than 'thousand developer' systems. Quantify that in an objective way, please?

I think he means that the Slackware of today is exactly the same as the Slackware of yesterday. The software may have been upgraded, but the underlying philosophy of the way it is assembled remains the same.

Originally Posted by unSpawn The simplicity of design and structure tends to provide speed to even antique machines, since the idea of cruft and bloat is a non-issue. Idem dito.

You want quantification? OK. A COMPLETE installation of Slackware-current is 517 packages. That figure includes almost 100 packages worth of KDE "language bloat".

Have a look around. How many Linux distributions today ship with fewer than 1500 packages? Not many. Most of them (like Suse, Fedora, Mandrake, etc) require 10 to 12 gigs of hard disk space for a complete installation. The complete Slackware takes up less than 4 gigs.

Originally Posted by unSpawn since you already stated yourself you spent time in "dependency hell", do you really think you should market that as an advantage for using Slack?

???

He said this:

Having tried Slack, I find I can at least say I've never spent hours in dependency hell

(emphasis added)
And I can agree with that. After 7 years of using Linux, I've always found that automatic dependancy resolution causes more problems than it solves. That Slackware doesn't have this "functionality" should be considered a blessing.

What is that supposed to mean? Do you understand what is meant by the term "derivative project?"
I was hoping for something that could be marked as giving back to the community, something that would benefit anyone outside the Slack-verse. Prolly should have phrased that qualitatively "better".


I got the impression by reading the changelogs that Pat dropped GNOME because it was becoming too large and ungainly for one man to package.
Looks like a qualitatively "good" reason to me. Of course it could also be used as an argument to point out bottlenecks, but OK.


I think he means that the Slackware of today is exactly the same as the Slackware of yesterday. The software may have been upgraded, but the underlying philosophy of the way it is assembled remains the same.
I can't see how other distro's differ at that.


You want quantification? OK. A COMPLETE installation of Slackware is 517 packages. That figure includes almost 100 packages worth of KDE "language bloat".
If those are solid figures then that's an excellent argument.

Originally Posted by rkelsen He said this: Originally Posted by mephisto786 Having tried Slack, I find I can at least say I've never spent hours in dependency hell

My bad. Misread that.

My company runs basically only Slackware. Our revenue last year was over $12 million. We will never let go of Slackware. It just WORKS and it stable and I wouldn't recommend another distro to anybody.

We have over 100 servers with slackware and on most of the older machinbes, the uptime is over 1200 days. We use it for firewalls, routers, web servers, dns servers, mail servers, dhcp servers, domain controllers, sql server and everything else you can think of.

slackware > *

My company (..)
That's a nice testimonial but claiming "it works" or stability as unique selling points for Slackware versus other distributions won't hold up and you know it. (Digressing a bit, and talking Linux in a commercial production environment, I would be the least impressed with uptime measured in years. Less downtime than covered in the SLA's: now that shows excellence IMHO. And that can't be claimed as distribution-specific either.)

Originally Posted by unSpawn I was hoping for something that could be marked as giving back to the community, something that would benefit anyone outside the Slack-verse.

Out of curiosity, how many other commercial Linuxes do this?

Originally Posted by unSpawn Of course it could also be used as an argument to point out bottlenecks, but OK.

I can see where you're coming from, but you're forgetting that one of the main resaons Slackware exists is to put food on Pat's table. There are other distributions which are built by huge teams of people, which have better community support and have the latest of *everything*. That Slackware even competes on such a playing field is a credit to the bloke who assembles it, no?

Originally Posted by unSpawn I can't see how other distro's differ at that.

Fair enough. You're probably right.

Out of curiosity, how many other commercial Linuxes do this?
Hmm. I wouldn't want to narrow it down to labels like "commercial" unless you really value the underdog role. Only ones come to mind are vendors where in-house developers are allowed to work on kernel/FOSS projects in the bosses time, RH did provide the community with RPM and OBSD with OpenSSH. I'm pretty sure there's more examples, but if you where to counter this doesn't have any bearing on the article discussion I wouldn't disagree.


I can see where you're coming from
Having an eye for the procedural side of things ain't good you mean?


you're forgetting that one of the main reasons Slackware exists is to put food on Pat's table. (...) That Slackware even competes on such a playing field is a testament to the bloke who assembles it, no?
Nice way of putting it, absolutely, also a honest reason (for why it would matter to mr V) as well IMHO.

Derivative projects? Count the number of live cds now trying Slax technology over Knoppix...not arguing relative merits of knoppix vs slax, there is a huge increase of late in slack based distros and modular pkg management to create your own live cds.....

As for Gnome, I think the key word in the chnanglogs is invasive...it tends to muck with kde menus, unless specially configured...which btw, i found Freerock an excellent example of....

As for the request for authoritive support and supporting the statements made in the original essay, it's listed under OPINION, not TECH or HISTORY or FAQ, and the general nature of distro reviews is primarily concerned with a users opinions and experience with the distros....i guess the response to the thread at least points up one thing....?

Slack matters

Originally Posted by mephisto786 As for Gnome, I think the key word in the chnanglogs is invasive...it tends to muck with kde menus, unless specially configured...which btw, i found Freerock an excellent example of....

If you go back and read the changelog, GNOME was removed because it was too man-intensive to keep GNOME running under Slackware standards.

The invasive part is in relation to recommending other options for the GNOME desktop - Pat had several recommendations but could not recommend Dropline GNOME since Dropline had a habit of replacing Slackware standard packages for ones that have been recompiled for x686 only rather than compiling for i486 (with i686 optimizations).

Originally Posted by alisonken1 The invasive part is in relation to recommending other options for the GNOME desktop - Pat had several recommendations but could not recommend Dropline GNOME since Dropline had a habit of replacing Slackware standard packages for ones that have been recompiled for x686 only rather than compiling for i486 (with i686 optimizations).

This is not only completely off the subject, but it's not even close to what he said in the ChangeLog. I am, however, not surprised. People pretty much just make up whatever they want to make up when it's convenient. I tend to remember it pretty vividly because it's pretty common jibber-jabber of the troll.

I will quote it for you - right from his ChangeLog:

gnome/*: Removed from -current, and turned over to community support and distribution. I'm not going to rehash all the reasons behind this, but it's been under consideration for more than four years. There are already good projects in place to provide Slackware GNOME for those who want it, and these are more complete than what Slackware has shipped in the past. So, if you're looking for GNOME for Slackware -current, I would recommend looking at these two projects for well-built packages that follow a policy of minimal interference with the base Slackware system: http://gsb.sf.net http://gware.sf.net There is also Dropline, of course, which is quite popular. However, due to their policy of adding PAM and replacing large system packages (like the entire X11 system) with their own versions, I can't give quite the same sort of nod to Dropline. Nevertheless, it remains another choice, and it's _your_ system, so I will also mention their project: http://www.dropline.net/gnome/ Please do not incorrectly interpret any of this as a slight against GNOME itself, which (although it does usually need to be fixed and polished beyond the way it ships from upstream more so than, say, KDE or XFce) is a decent desktop choice. So are a lot of others, but Slackware does not need to ship every choice. GNOME is and always has been a moving target (even the "stable" releases usually aren't quite ready yet) that really does demand a team to keep up on all the changes (many of which are not always well documented). I fully expect that this move will improve the quality of both Slackware itself, and the quality (and quantity) of the GNOME options available for it. Folks, this is how open source is supposed to work. Enjoy. :-)

I don't know if your intent is to deliberately misinform, but I figured that I'd just point out that there is no mention of architecture within this ChangeLog. If you were to select words such as; "PAM" and "X11", then you might actually be correct about his alleged reasoning for the "suggestions" about which GNOME desktop to use. However, I question his ability to really be the judge, seeing as he's likely never used any GNOME build on Slackware aside from his own. But I digress.

Since he seems to be improving his X11 builds with this next release, and is even progressing towards modernizing the builds by moving Freetype2 and Fontconfig out of X11 and into their own packages (one of the things we've done in Dropline for years now - Yay progress!), then there is certainly some hope that we will not have to include our own X11 builds, *provided* that there aren't any more known unpatched bugs in his X11 builds that prevent GNOME components from working correctly (this and the formerly included Freetype/Fontconfig are the big issues).

Additionally, it's likely only a matter of time before PAM becomes a requirement for many pieces of software on Slackware (it already is, and he's temporarily able to get by with patching around it). In this case, we could likely stop building it on our own PAM (it's essentially a GNOME requirement these days, and other people on Slackware are busting their balls in an attempt to make stuff work without PAM and consolehelper), and we'd all be happy. That is, of course, unless it's simply done incorrectly. I think that Piter Punk has finally whipped Udev into shape for Pat, so we can probably stop including that one as well with Dropline 2.16.0 after Slackware 11.0 is released. Maybe someone will whip PAM into shape for Pat too, so he can finally start taking it seriously. Of course, it may just be "too complicated". Hard to tell what the reasoning is these days, seeing as there hasn't been a single legit security issue for several years now (see link below).

http://secunia.com/product/1701/

Ok, gotta put my 2cents in for Slack.

I started out on Slack. It starts teaching you from the very start! As Slack folks will tell you... Slack has a steep learning curve; your gonna learn alot in a very short time.
As it installs, Slack names and explains every package. This is a great way to get to know the system. It installs simple and intrinsically - tar.gz files. Tarballs will work on ANY system - therefore you should learn how to use them! Learn how to compile your programs with ./configure and make - it's a useful skill.
Slack encourages you to dig down into the bin directories and etc - learn! If you bother to learn, you can do some very powerful things with Slack. The basic Slack install gives you all of the standard tools that any veteran Linux user would expect.
What you learn in Slack you can take to ANY Linux distro and thrive - none of the learning is wasted. Heck, Slack is a better learning environment for computer science than some colleges IMHO.

Anyway, enjoy Slack for what it is,
Codifex Maximus

No need to ask what slack gives back to the community since it was basically in a nutshell
"The Beginning" of the community distrobution wise...

Originally Posted by zborgerd This is not only completely off the subject, but it's not even close to what he said in the ChangeLog. I am, however, not surprised. People pretty much just make up whatever they want to make up when it's convenient. I tend to remember it pretty vividly because it's pretty common jibber-jabber of the troll. <snip> I don't know if your intent is to deliberately misinform, but I figured that I'd just point out that there is no mention of architecture within this ChangeLog. If you were to select words such as; "PAM" and "X11", then you might actually be correct about his alleged reasoning for the "suggestions" about which GNOME desktop to use.

Having been a Slacker since 1993 AND a preference for the GNOME desktop, I've followed this issue closely. And I've used Dropline as well.

PAM is one issue, but also the different philosophy between Dropline GNOME and Slackware is another issue.

Dropline recompiles whatever it can for x686 only. Slackware is supposed to be compiled for x486 (with x686 optimizations). There was even a discussion on Dropline to create x686 compiled Slackware distribution because of that issue.

So, no, it's not misinformation. You are probably thinking of complete information, whereas I only provided one item of information.

Originally Posted by alisonken1 Having been a Slacker since 1993 AND a preference for the GNOME desktop, I've followed this issue closely. And I've used Dropline as well. PAM is one issue, but also the different philosophy between Dropline GNOME and Slackware is another issue. Dropline recompiles whatever it can for x686 only. Slackware is supposed to be compiled for x486 (with x686 optimizations). There was even a discussion on Dropline to create x686 compiled Slackware distribution because of that issue. So, no, it's not misinformation. You are probably thinking of complete information, whereas I only provided one item of information.

I'll repeat myself for those that cannot read. The arch was not mentioned in the ChangeLog. It was misinformation.