http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/83818.html

You know, the usual.

_

Let me add a few more I thought were noteworthy:

Slackware's installer is not broken, as the reviewer seems to be implying. Rather, it is simply not what he, and other typical users, are used to. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!"

Enough has been said about this to fill volumes.

As stated above, the installer is not hard to fathom; it's just not pretty.

Reading won't kill the typical new user; it's just that it's too inconvenient, and the user is not expected to engage his brain to understand the simple instructions contained in the documentation.

In conclusion, more of the same kind of review. Were we really expecting anything different?

2 members found this post helpful.

This is the one that gets me every time. I'll concede that partitioning is slightly more involved than a lot of other distros, but other than that, the only real difference is that there aren't pretty pictures to accompany the text. And if that's a deal-breaker for you, then your priorities might be out of whack.

_

5 members found this post helpful.

What I never can understand is why all these people make comments like this:
and then go on to say that Slackware needs to change. Why?
So that we can be ??
And that means who exactly?

2 members found this post helpful.

If it were down to me, I'd go the other way and make it more like the OpenBSD installer: with just a purely textual question/response stream and non of this unnecessary ncurses fluff!
(i.e. something I could actually write an 'expect' script for should I need to).

1 members found this post helpful.

Actually, the point the author makes is a good one. If you aren't familiar with a subject, trying to read in-depth documentation isn't always the easiest thing. I've seen this time and again on the CyanogenMod forums. While the process of installing CM on phones is thoroughly documented on the wiki, even I would sometimes have a hard time reading through a particular device's instructions if I wasn't familiar with it (mainly Samsung stuff, since I never owned a Samsung smartphone and the extra software they needed was sometimes confusing).

Have you ever read a wikipedia article and just thought, "Well, that's too advanced for me."? I consider myself a pretty smart all around person, but some concepts are still very difficult for me to grasp without spending an inordinate amount of time studying it. I remember reading up on the Apollo program and getting more in depth with the rockets used on the various stages, specific impulse kept coming up, but I wasn't familiar with it, so I visited the wikipedia page in the hopes I could get a quick blurb on it from the heading, but the heading didn't really clear anything up. I then went further in the article and realized that it was too in-depth for my taste and I didn't want to spend the time needed to fully understand it.

I can see that many articles on the Slackware wiki could fall under the "heavy reads" label. I mean, just the installation instructions would print out to 11 pages. I'm not saying the information covered in there isn't important, but I can see how that could be overwhelming for a new user, especially if they aren't familiar with Linux. And that just covers installation... there's another 8 pages on how to configure your new Slackware system. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we need to change the wiki -- because it is important to have this stuff documented -- but it is certainly understandable why someone would get overwhelmed or consider it a "heavy read" if they aren't terribly familiar with Slackware and/or Linux. Everyone says the installer isn't difficult, but then people have to read 11 pages on the wiki about installing Slackware? Something is amiss here

3 members found this post helpful.

Indeed! The OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and the Slackware installation routines make more sense to me than the "clicky goodness" of other operating systems.
Slackware does expect the end user to read and comprehend the ample, available documentation.

1 members found this post helpful.

I do agree with a lot, if not all of this. I can definitely see someone with zero prior experience feeling overwhelmed. But I think that's true of pretty much any distro. Mint, for all its ease of use, has a 7-12 page install section in its 52-page initial user guide (https://www.linuxmint.com/documentation.php), depending on whether you include downloading and burning the image.

I'm very clearly biased, but I started with Slackware and I think I'm better for it. For example: Yeah, you have to manually partition the disk instead of clicking a picture and then "Next", but when you're done, now you forever know how to manually partition a drive... I think things like that are important, especially for newbies.

_

1 members found this post helpful.

I think even "those typical new users" know that LXLE is not a linux desktop.

Too bad that they allow such 'experts' to voice their opinions ...

[RANT]
I personally appreciate the fact that Slackware ALLOWS me to set up the Drive Partitioning myself, rather than the one-size-fits-all approach of the 'easy' installers.

For example, I had to build a System last week with dual SDD Drives set up as two RAID 1 partitions ( /boot and / ) and a SWAP Partiton on each Drive.

With CentOS 6.x, there is a catch 22 -- I was unable to ( or I couldn't figure out how to ) OverProvision the Drives with the CentOS installer before it took off, partitioning and installing the OS and screwing up the drives ( [Alt][F2] didn't drop me to the command line as I thought it should where I could run `hdparm` ).

OTOH, I was able to boot a Slackware USB Drive, drop to the command line and run `hdparm --yes-i-know-what-i-am-doing -NpSSSSSSSSSS` to overprovision the drives BEFORE anything was written to the new SDDs.

After overprovisioning the drives via `hdparm` with the Slackware USB, I booted the CentOS 6.x USB, partitioned the Linux RAID Partitions and went to town with training wheels as RH intended.

Anyhow, One thing I do know about one-size-fits-all is that it really means one-size-fits-none.
[/RANT]

-- kjh

2 members found this post helpful.

A lot of this article is irrelevant because Slackware has never, as far as I know, been recommended as a first distro for newbies. It's not designed for that "market". Of course someone who knows nothing about Linux would find it difficult to install, but anyone who had been using Linux for a year or so (even if it was only Ubuntu) probably wouldn't find it too problematic.

There are plenty of other distros that use text-based or ncurses-based installers. It's just that they're not as well-known as Slackware. Actually I like ncurses. It provides all the usability of a graphical interface (except that you can't use the mouse) with none of the hardware problems. Fully graphical installers can cause all sorts of trouble, especially with non-Intel graphics cards. I recently installed AntiX for a friend (and that was a machine with Intel graphics) but the graphical installer crashed on me, whereas the cli installer went smoothly to the end.

2 members found this post helpful.

I agree with this. While I did have some basic "Linux" in college using RedHat 7.2 where they locked us into a non-X environment to learn the shell (they said if someone used startx, they would fail the class... back then, I didn't know how they would know, but now, it's probably just because of logging, so it would've been easy to hide), it didn't take me very far. I tried to install it on my laptop at home and once I installed everything, I found it couldn't recognize the CD drive. Still not sure how the installer was able to use it to install, but the OS didn't support the drive. Supposedly, it was properly supported with Mandrake, but I shrugged it off and went back to Windows 2000. A few years later, I was wanting to try it again and a buddy suggested I use Slackware (the whole "once you go Slack, you don't go back" thing... he had done a lot of distro hopping and settled on Slackware). I didn't have any problems installing it on a newer laptop, although, once in, I struggled getting the wireless to work. After about a week, and several kernel compiles, I had working wireless and everything else was cake. I've had Slackware on at least one computer since then.

I have learned so much about the internals of Linux over the years from using Slackware. I understand how dependencies work and how to find missing ones. I know how to partition drives, switch from MBR to GPT or vice versa, set up lilo.conf, configure X (when needed), build a kernel, generate a Slackware package, create an rc file (aka set up a daemon), create a script for repetitive tasks, etc. That isn't to say that you can't learn that stuff in other distros or that you have to learn it in Slackware, but Slackware sets up an environment that encourages learning. I doubt my knowledge level would be as high as it is (which is still probably middle of the road) if I were using another distro over the last decade plus.

4 members found this post helpful.

Agreed. The average newbie just wants a working system at minimal effort and minimal knowledge of what's actually going on under the hood. Distros like Ubuntu and Mint are designed to be as easy as possible for those types of people. Slackware is for people who are okay with putting in a little bit of effort to understand their system so that they can be in full control of it, meanwhile being as simple and trouble-free as possible from that point of view. The annoying thing about these reviews is that they usually try to judge every distribution based on how easy it is for a Linux newbie to use, which completely misses the point. It's like if a food critic was judging a steak and gave it a bad score because there was no whipped cream and cherry on top.

4 members found this post helpful.

I think the review was accurate, informed, and well thought-out. Certainly a lot better than the hit pieces that "the usual" used to put out with regularity.

That said, I wish reviewers would compare Slackware to what it's actually competing with (Gentoo, Arch, the BSDs, but Arch in particular), and not to distributions that were designed with completely different goals in mind.

6 members found this post helpful.

+1 on that.

Slackware is great for beginners willing to read a lot and get their hands dirty. For the casual user, I'd rather recommend Ubuntu or Mint.

2 members found this post helpful.