Fair enough, sorry! I'm leery of things that update frequently. ;^)

1 members found this post helpful.

I was always looking for an optimal balance between stability and new or, at least, not outdated software.
In the past, i used to jump from Debian Stable to Testing or to Sid, and everytime i had the feeling that something was not right. After a few years i had my Arch era. A ton of updates every week. Sometimes, a manual intervention was required. The lesson was that "the latest and the greatest" 1)is more a hype than a need and 2)does not equals maximum productivity.
Now, i believe that Slackware offers a great solution to the equation "stability and software upgrades". I can run for example a 4.14 kernel or a 4.19 kernel, (my desktop is two years old) combined with a "new" vivaldi browser, lyx editor, the latest rawtherapee, libreoffice etc on a rock solid Slackware 14.2 installation.
A few days go, i did a full upgrade to current (btw, current looks great). In any case, the decision is mine and with Slackware as a base, it is much easier to adjust my system and to "upgrade" a specific piece of software if i want to.

PS: Regarding kernels or kde (if i switch to plasma), OP's plan seems quit logical for me too.

2 members found this post helpful.

I confess to a very strong resolution to move away from -current when 14.2 came out, for many of the reasons expressed in this thread. However my addiction to the excitement of -current meant that my 'strong resolution' did not last that long .

3 members found this post helpful.

I don't understand why you assume you must make a choice. Why not install both?

I hear Steppenwolf's The Pusher playing in the background.

1 members found this post helpful.

That would be sensible: stable as day-to-day and -current on VM...

My system has an AMD FX-8350 and 16 GB DDR3 RAM. It gets the job done when I test my SlackBuilds and when I create my own repository with slackrepo. True, QT5 takes 4 hours to build on all 8 cores...

1 members found this post helpful.

It works great for me, although I use multiple partitions / installs rather than VMs. For me, stability through redundancy is easier and safer than freezing a system.

Except for the kernel I run 14.2 exactly for your reasons. Stability. I do download and build new kernels, always keeping a known working one just in case of problems, because I do have quite a bit of new hardware, but otherwise running 14.2 with some Slackbuild and Alien packages here and there is reliable.

I ran Gentoo for a while but I found that in an attempt to be "helpful" Portage often tried to install or even worse remove packages that I didn't want installed or removed, and updates just got to be absurdly frequent. I am quite happy running Slack stable and knowing that there won't be any nasty surprises coming at me.

4 members found this post helpful.

That encapsulates exactly the reason I do what I do with my computer: I trust no one to know what's best for my computer except yours truly. Slackware allows me to do just that.

Both hardware and software upgrade treadmills are past to me those days. I see my box - and the software within - just as a tool that MUST work whenever I have work to do (I'm a full stack developer/devop) because it brings the bucks I need to pay for my motorcycle trips. I don't like the idea to hit the road at late because I had to deal with a computer glitch.

My current box is a second hand Lenovo Thinkpad X250 (model 20CLS4Q600, mnf. date 2016/07) i5-5300U, iHD Graphics 5500, 12.5" Full HD IPS display, 8GB DDR3L-1600 SODIMM, 500GB 7200RPM HD and 256GB M2 NGFF 2242 SSD. The one before this was an Asus X450C i3-2365M which was replaced after seven years of honorable services. Thanks to Slackware, both are pretty capable during their lifespan.

Just like some of you, I also enjoy an up-to-date system. -current sometimes breaks things. Broken things makes me hit the road later than sooner, which you know... I'd rather avoid.

To stay -current and avoid risks of breaking things, first I've read all the recommendations here, then I did it many, many times by hand to understand every single step, then I automated some stuff with functions here and there... voilà.

My workflow is something like:

• Regular -current upgrades (kernels-generic and kernel-modules are blacklisted):
  
  
  Code:

  slackpkg update
  slackpkg upgrade slackpkg
  slackpkg new-config
  yes n | slackpkg update
  slackpkg upgrade glibc-solibs
  init 3
  slackpkg install ktown
  slackpkg install-new
  slackpkg upgrade ktown
  slackpkg upgrade-all
  slackpkg clean-system
  slackpkg check-updates
  slackpkg new-config
  reboot

• Kernel upgrades: when a kernel upgrade is released in -current, the actual working kernel becomes the previous one, install the new kernel (which includes a mkinitrd for hardware support+LUKS+LVM), Then delete the old previous kernel (the one behind the actual working one that was the main kernel until now). That way I ALWAYS have at least two kernel versions installed: the just installed one (which I don't know it's going to work until reboot) and the actual one (which I know is working because I've booted with it). If things goes wrong while rebooting, lilo just let me select the previous kernel and that's it... system is back on duty.

Using this method, which is made possible only by my personal day to day experience and requirements, I'm able to keep my box in pretty good pace with -current and also keep it rock solid when more sensitive stuff arrives, such as kernel, glibc-solibs and other deal breakers.

Of course this is all done by a bunch of functions I wrote myself. So all that I actually have to do is to call them and monitor their output.I always have the chance to act accordingly if things goes wrong. Never had to do so...

4 members found this post helpful.

This is exactly how I approach kernels, and for exactly the same reasons. Also, that's why I like LILO so much; it is flexible. I know grub has its own approach to this, but I like simplicity and a conf file that's easy to understand, and since I have no need of (U)EFI, this is the approach I've chosen for the foreseeable future.

4 members found this post helpful.

I know this is a Slackware thread but the topic is valid for me right now. When I used Linux, I lived for updates: there was a thrill when I ran (typically Arch) updates and got something (daily). This comes at a price, as others have mentioned.

I now use FreeBSD and no longer use Linux. FreeBSD has a relatively slow update cycle, in the RELEASE branch anyway, and I have trained myself to only update every couple of weeks. This is a tad different than the Linux world because the core OS is updated separately from user installed software, and also with a completely different set of tools.

My point to all of this is I agree with the topic of this thread: updates are a treadmill. If security patches are taken care of and everything is working, no need to update, regardless of the OS you use.

4 members found this post helpful.

You will like UEFI an elilo even better in that case. You get a simple conf file you can edit just as with LILO AND you don't have to change the write boot loader every time you change it. Literally just change the conf file and boot.

I used to boot with elilo in the retired box. It's very simple to manage indeed.

But the new box came with a windows 10 (handy to deal with proprietary GPS and corporate stuff) which I decided to keep so I can boot it as bare metal or inside a VM in the same HDD partition. elilo cannot chainload boot loaders. Also it does not support password protected boot options, which I use to boot windows 10 in bare metal mode, Slackware recovery and memtest images.

elilo is simple, just a bit too simple.