Hi fellow Slackers,

Distrowatch weekly issue #478 sports a detailed review of Slackware 14.0.

http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?is...121015#feature

Nothing new under the sun, but a little bit of publicity is always nice. I commented the review in the reader comments (as user "Microlinux").

Cheers,

Niki

"half-assed technology preview" made me smile ;-)

Link seems down at the moment for me. Will try again later.

edit: Looks like my crappy ISP has cocked it's dns up again. switching to google's public dns sorted it out.

:d :d :d

To paraphrase, "Reading partially informed DistroWatch reviews on the Slackware distribution is a boring experience and, as the Slackbook says, that's the way slackers like it."

1 members found this post helpful.

I'd say that's a pretty fair review. The "boredom" is what drove me to Slackware. I love(d) Arch Linux, but after a year of fiddling with it, I decided I'd rather just use that machine than constantly tinker with it. It's been smooth sailing since moving to Slack. It's really nice to get your install set up, with all your 3rd party software, and know that beyond security updates, you're done. There will be no nasty surprises waiting in a daily update.

2 members found this post helpful.

+1 on that. I had a brief stint with Arch. The general approach and the outstanding documentation drove me to it. I even went so far as to install a few desktop clients in a production environment. Then I got badly burnt by an X.org update: no more mouse, no more keyboard, asked in the forum and got flamed because I had overlooked the relevant thread explaining the new configuration changes somewhere else on the site. That was my brief history with Arch, to be archived under a personal category of "Eternally promising but so full of surprises that it's next to unusable in production" along with Crux and Gentoo.

So Slack it is. Boring is good. No drama.

1 members found this post helpful.

I see your +1 and raise you ^2

I'd rather be bored and have a system that doesn't foul up on me than one I'm fighting with each and every day to the get the simplest task done right.

1 members found this post helpful.

That pretty much sums up what Slackware is all about.

Not sure what an exciting OS looks like, but judging by the professional and exciting OS used at work, with its non-stop security patches, reboots, and frequent crashes, I'll go with boring.

http://us.generation-nt.com/answer/a...192323641.html

Not sure what they were doing to take so long to install. In an hour I had installed it, configured it, broke it, changed my mind about the formatting options on my ssd, re-installed it and re-configured it. I might even have started installing some extra software.

Overall it was a report written by someone with preconceptions that Slackware is somehow lacking because it doesn't do the stuff that other linux flavours do. I guess we must all be wrong and we should all move to a more progressive and exciting distribution.

samac

This is an issue with the authors hardware. Any distro takes much longer than usual to install on his system, which is pointed out also in the comments. He must have a really slow DVD reader or harddisk.

The article brings up a good point: Why doesn't slackware resolve depencies?
<sets out some chairs and gets the popcorn ready>


Joking aside, I really wish the reviews would go over the fact that Slackware is like the ultimate swiss army knife for your computer.

If there's something you need, it's probably installed: I poked around for a LISP SlackBuild before figuring it out that CLISP is already installed, along with almost every other major language toolset I'd ever want. There's multiple: browsers, window managers, desktop environments, mail readers, shells, versions of the 'snake' game, (g)vi(m), music players, video players, and on and on.

And even though it has all of these, it's not slow. It's probably faster than a lot of distributions once you factor in time saved from having 90% of what you want already installed. Don't use something installed? Just ignore it, it's probably not holding you back in any way. Minimalistic Linux installs feel like a toy next to one that's full featured, cries of 'bloat' be damned.

The Slackware community isn't so vocal about our third party support but it's there: SlackBuilds.org, sbopkg.org and an impressive repository of queue files to use with sbopkg are all available to help you install extra software rather painlessly. AlienBob, rworkman and others also have repositories of software of all kinds.

Slackware doesn't hide anything from you, and it's software set is often a reflection of this: lilo, the bootloader; the package management tools, all written in shell script, open them up sometime; the build scripts for everything, again, shell script!. This simplicity keeps you, the sysadmin, in control of your machine.

Why wouldn't someone want to try Slackware? I'm not sure it's the best option for someone who has no idea of how to admin their own machine besides clicking on an icon and expecting installation to happen - good thing there's other distros for them. You might also not want to try Slackware if you want to retain respect for any other distro which no doubt does everything wrong after you get a taste of Slackadminning.

Author's Note: I didn't get paid for writing this, and neither did it come down off of a mountain written on some stone tablets.
'Bob' might have coerced me a bit; much was Slack during the writing of all previous prose. Have a nice day!

3 members found this post helpful.

From all the stuff I've ever seen and read I came to the conclusion some time ago that Distrowatch doesn't like Slackware. Why I can only guess (windows users perhaps) but they seem biased in my opinion. And not just against Slackware.