Very much improved on i18n due to userspace change, and significant advancement in filesystem, block device, wireless network, and etc. on the kernel side.

For ease of use, still not much better than Windows NT 4.0 at the basic system level, but outperforms Windows 10 from every aspect.

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Agreed! I have two Lenovo T420 laptops each running a 2.5 GHz processor, 8 GB RAM, and SSD drives. The unit running Slackware64-current and XFCE is responsive and a pleasure to use. The other unit with the same specifications runs Win 10 Pro. The Win 10 unit is sluggish at best.

Wintermute is an AI... a key character in William Gibson's classic 1984 cyberpunk novel "Neuromancer".


A poll was taken at USENIX-'99 of attendee's fave hostnames for their computers. Some of the best were:
Sauron (Bill Joy)
Shiva (Steve Jobs)
Pigpen (Larry Wall)


I wonder what Bill Gates' machine was named? Smeagol?


bsD

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I think there's something badly wrong with someone who calls his computer Sauron.

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Heh. Careful. We must not speak of the Dark Lord.
In my opinion there's no foul in calling your PC whatever you wish.

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___________________________________________

<Choke!!..gag!!>

I'd have still been formatting floppies Sunday night!!!


{root@wintermute}/root%>fdformat -n /dev/fd0H1440 && mkfs.vfat -v /dev/fd0H1440
Formatting /dev/fd0H1440....................................................
..............................................................................................
..............................................................................................
..............................................................................................
...............zzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Slackware 9.0 was the first version of Slackware I used, which came out in 2003.

It is probably easier to install and get up and running now.

For one, there wasn't anything like 'udev' that would auto-load all of the modules - even with stuff like 'hotplug' back in the day, in my experience there were many modules you had to manually specify you wanted loaded. This required greater knowledge of one's hardware than is required now.

But use? I'm not sure - I'd say it's about the same level of ease of use. Once you get it up and running, you're still using it the same basic way you were in 2003 - editing config files with an editor, tweaking shell scripts, installing and running the software you want to run, etc.

Agree with the first sentence but NT 4.0? Granted it finally got simultaneous disc access right and that as well as all the rest 4.0 got right was inherited from the work MS did on IBM's OS/2. It still felt a lot like OS/2, but not nearly as good, until Win2K. For me that was THE breakthrough Windows that nearly seduced me away from so-called "alternative" systems. Thankfully I discovered Linux in 1999 and didn't get under the spell of the glitzy seduction that finally had started to work right.

True but I went to the opposite pole. On my first PC, a Tandy 8086 with DOS 3 on it, I modded the command prompt to say "Yes, Master?"

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8^P Yes but according to Mr. Edison (which actually may have come from Kate Sanborn in the 1890s), "Genius is 2% Inspiration and 98% Perspiration".

Yes but since that is a kernel development issue it is across the board Linux easier. The method of installation has changed drastically on other distros while Slackware is still exactly and wisely the same, and IMHO, exactly for this reason was and still is the absolute easiest OpSys of ANY to install exactly the way I want it to. It does not try to force me into it's "canonical" ways. BTW that's not just a dig against the 'Buntus, but all other distros with the possible exception of Arch but that's much more difficult because their Canon affects every stage of installation including methodology.

So in regards to this thread. I don't find Slackware any easier to install or run than it was, excepting kernel development which made all Linux easier, but Slackware didn't get more complicated while all the others did. Possibly the most important and wisest decision Patrick ever made was to not assume use case, just keep it "human" enough to make it as easy as possible to get what we want. It's a crying shame so few today in the Linux Community as a whole realize this. Most think it is a pita to maintain with manual dependency resolution but I find Slackware to require the least amount of maintenance of any OpSys, bar none. That IMHO is a HUGE accomplishment. Thank you PV.

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Chiming in on a couple of subtopics:

The last OS I installed from floppies was OS/2 2.1. When I jumped to Slackware in 1996, my install medium was the 3.0 CD from the back cover of "Linux Unleashed".

I kept using that CD until finally switching up to Slackware 7.1, years later. By then I think the setup script supported installing from hard drive, so I only needed to make a boot floppy. The rest of the OS had been previously downloaded to /sw on the freshly-formatted filesystem to which I was installing.

I burned DVDs for 10.2 and 12.x, but otherwise stuck with the practice of downloading Slackware and installing it from that. I still do that. All of my systems have /sw141 or /sw142 directories. It's come in handy over the years when I've messed up my system and needed to recover, or when I wanted to install Slackware on a new system but had no access to a fast network. As long as I had another Slackware system handy, I could copy its /sw* to the new system by plugging the new disk into the old system and tar or rsync it over.

Regarding package management, I am pretty happy with .t?z packages. Until very recently I would download the specific updates I needed and use installpkg. Last year I started maintaining a -current test machine, so familiarized myself with slackpkg, which makes comprehensive system-wide updates very convenient.

For sbo, I use sbopkg even though I should probably switch up to sbotools, which seems better-behaved and easier to troubleshoot or modify (since my perl skills are much better than my bash).

The diversity of package management tools seems like a blessing. It's good to have choice, and having one tool for Slackware official packages and others for sbo allows each to focus on solving different problems. That means each can be a simpler solution.

The cost is that I have to learn how to use two different tools, which doesn't bother me in the slightest.

Regarding hardware support, like rworkman said, it used to be crucial to research hardware to make sure it would work with Slackware. This is less crucial now, but I stay in the habit. Enough users have told tales of woe in LQ and in the IRC channels to keep me wary.

A little research can go a long way to assuring a trouble-free experience. I'm not too proud to cheat, as well -- when I'm ready to buy a new system, I'll find out what hardware someone else has been using trouble-free and buy the exact same hardware. Or I'll hop on Ebay and get another of an older system I already have, if there's no need for something more high-octane.

One downside to that is it has eroded my ability to help other people. I don't see problems on my systems, so I haven't had to solve those problems, so when someone asks for help, I might not recognize the problem, nor have a ready fix.

That's part of the reason for the -current system, though I haven't been able to spend as much time testing it as I'd like.

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That sounds like an excellent strategy! Back in the early 2000's, we designed a central music library for a chain of 38 radio stations that used Slack 8.0. I maintained a bootp server with a master image of the customized OS at headquarters in Austin, and had the local engineers tape
a LILO boot disk to the side of the client boxes at each station. If a box crashed, rebooting from the rescue disk ran fsck -rAV, and rebuilt the system disk.
But your idea sounds sweet, now that hard drive space is so cheap. I think I'll create a hidden partition on my drives, and put a baseline bzimage of my configured system in it. I really like sbotools...handles dependencies well, easy to use.

Cheers!

BS.d

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Thanks for keeping things inclusive for all and for your work on SBo and the packages on your repo. I am loving XFCE 4.14.

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