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Ok, it was a rant and yes I used bloated in the wrong way, sorry
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That's an overused word on LQ forums: bloated. A full installation takes about 7 GB, that's less than 20% of my relatively small HDDs. I don't use all the software now, but may do sometime. Even if I never use it (whatever it is), if it's not running it's not bothering me. If I wanted as comprehensive a system with any other distro, I'd have to waste hours apt-getting, yumming, or whatevering. Then there's: already got libwotsit? Oh, you need libwotsit-dev as well.
If you're not happy, use summat else. |
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Short answer: don't worry, be happy. |
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Never question the great and power Patrick unless asking a question. Hail Bob!
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A New Appreciation for slackware
After tinkering with some other systems I've recently developed a deeper appreciation for slackware, which is a big deal because it was pretty deep already. The main reason is that while many other distributions have massive repositories of applications, they are of varying quality. The slackware system on the other hand is near perfect. I can't remember the last time any application in the supported release broke at all. The only things that have ever misbehaved have been third party stuff.
The recent experience that led to this was my trying OpenBSD on an old iBook G4 I've got (over 10 years old now). It's got debian on it as well. The core OpenBSD system after an install is very minimal, comparable to the slackware A series I guess. Everything else needs to be installed as packages (or built from scratch using the ports system). It was all going fine until I tried to install alpine. It didn't work. And I haven't had time to really look into it to try and see why. I tried installing in a virtual machine on an intel machine just to see if it was a powerpc thing, but no it didn't work there either. There is something wrong with the alpine package. This would never happen with any application in a slackware release. The beauty of slackware is that every application in a release gets top shelf support. While other distributions may have massive repositories, I'd be surprised if they could compete with slackware in the sense of how broad a range of applications get top shelf support. My understanding is that Pat expends a lot of effort to make sure everything in a release works perfectly together. If you were to install the same collection of applications from packages in many other distributions, something would surely misbehave. Cheers, Michael |
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Member Response
Hi,
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Hope this helps. Have fun & enjoy! :hattip: |
@brianL I definitely don't want to use something else :)
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Don't take me wrong, he says, as he http://syacartoonist.com/art/political-cartoons.jpg
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One serious question for Pat (if he is still reading this): how do you manage all of this (+1000 packages) while keeping your sanity?
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Protip: if there's stuff in ap/ or xap/ that you don't want, don't install it. The packages in those series are rarely dependencies for other packages, and the slack-desc files are descriptive enough that you can figure out whether you want to keep them. You can strip out an enormous amount of the official installation without causing any problems: I currently have 640 of the 1347 official Slackware packages installed on my laptop, and that's without trying particularly hard to remove the stuff in l/ that I don't use, because the libraries take up a few hundred kilobytes each and the time/reward tradeoff makes that particular endeavour unworthwhile.
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Also, dont forget about sbbdep, a third party tool for determining dependencies between slackware packages. If you only want to run a small number of things, this is one systematic way to work out what other packages you need. I found out about this via AlienBOB's blog.
However for most users, installing just the software series you want is probably "granular" enough, sbbdep is probably overkill. |
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