Hi all,

Sorry but I just HAVE to gush...

I was bored with Slackware (it works TOO well).
So I distro switched to Fedora 10 for a few days.

Well, long story short, and OH MY GOD do I appreciate Slackware.

Lets see Fedora issues:
Closed Source ATI drivers don't exist in the REPO and the ATI install.sh ones don't work. (and the vesa driver showed white line artifacts on my screen)
System froze twice in 3 days with random kernel error. Really quick google of said error pointed to Video drivers.
Fought with the horrible network manager thing to get a static IP set.
Everything was a few seconds slower.

I'm back in my Slack partition now.. What the heck was I thinking..
(I was thinking I wanted a few more challenges and be more red-hat familiar.. well forget it. nothing for me over there but frustration and typing "yum install" a zillion times...)

-Mike

I know the feeling. I was away from Slackware (to Ubuntu for some reason) for like, 3-4 months. I forgot what an operating system was supposed to act like. Now I'm back with my own custom Slack, with the only programs I need, and no stupid errors, glitches, or reminders that Ubuntu has.

ya know... if I do something stupid like 'su -c "rm -rf /usr/bin"' I deserve the problems associated with it... I don't need no warning telling me I shouldn't do it

Either way, I like my near lack of GUI and CLI configuration. I don't even use KDE... I've been testing out Open Box but before that I used blackbox .70...

I think my favorite part about slackware is the KISS

Haha. Note to new Linux users trying out Slackware: the above command shown by lumak should not be used under any circumstances (unless you want to kill someone's computer). This is the ONLY warning you will get: thats the beauty of Slackware

The only command that may be worse is `rm -rf /`.

True. That or the "shred" command.

A couple of years ago I installed Mepis to play with for a while. I will say that it worked alright and the default install had all the hardware working well, but when I changed my fstab and the changes 'disappeared' then read in a doc someplace that only half of the fstab was permanent (the other half gets re-written every time at boot somehow) I threw in the towel and decided I had to go back to being a Slacker.

Those kind of things might be nice for for people that don't have a clue what goes on 'under the hood' but that is just too many moving parts for my feeble mind to keep track of. I much prefer having to tell it what to do at every stage, rather than fighting against an 'educated guess' as engineered by people with degrees that are much smarter than me.

Simplicity and minimalism--even with KDE (I am really just a user of an o/s not a programmer or a 'techie' of any sort).

A simple distro for my simple mind, it is a great fit. I won't be looking at anything for me.

Interesting to hear that FC is just as terrible as it has been for the past 5 releases. I guess it just won't get any better.

Slacker Rex, You're a man after my own heart. Configuration files should bloody-well stay the way you leave them! I've no objection to 'wizards' that help you set them up in the first place, but having them change on their own is just wrong.


Welcome back into the fold Mike. Don't be too hard on yourself, we've all felt the urge to wander from time to time.

Welcome home, Mike! Yeah, we've all wandered away for a time to look for that better OS. The last time I ran Fedora was at FC4. I do boot into FreeBSD from time to time on one of my Slackware boxes, but, Slackware is and always will be my OS of choice!

That sums it up right there. Slackware's only chronic problem is the lack of exotic and exciting problems. I run -current because as solid as it is, I can usually count on some entertainment somewhere in a release cycle.

You're not alone. I also tried the new Fedora 10 recently . After several unsuccessful attempts to use the "greatly improved" network manager, I've already missed "netconfig" and those scripts in /etc/rc.d. When you are trying to use some other "modern" distros, suddenly, you realize how simple and elegant Slack is.

Same here. Lucky for me, my experiment with Fedora ended when the Live CD failed to boot.

I'm a distro Junkie............whenever there is a new release, I have to download it and install it. It's like curiosity killed the cat "Did the said distro developers get a decent release out this time?"

Needless to say, usually within 72 hours, Slackware is back on my box, up and running in no time at all.

Why do most of the big distros insist on knowing how to run my box better than I? Isn't that what Microsoft does? If I make a configuration change, I don't expect it to be overwritten/ignored FFS......The problem is most sheep have no idea what the hell is going on.

KISS = "Keep it simple stupid", thanks Slackware TEAM.

Most of the distro's out now are huge unmanageable pieces of poop. One observation I have is this.

Ubombtu is creating a lot of new Linux users, this is good and bad but from what I see on their forums, most users are not willing to move on to another distro. There is a quote I see on the Slackware mailing list, can't remember who now:

"Ubuntu is an African word meaning Slackware is to hard for me" or words to that effect. I love that quote!!

I do see some Ubombtu fanboys who are contrubuting to the Linux community as a whole but most of them are just young un-expreienced zealots.

Damn........I wrote way too much....................

Virtual machines are great for distro experiments. That way can keep Slackware on the box as the host and install into a VM. You don't even have to burn a DVD/CD as the VM's allow you to boot to an iso and run the install from there. Well worth a look if you are a "distro Junkie".