I understand exactly what you mean. I've tried several different distros and couldn't use any of them more then a few days.

But Arch sounds interesting.

And I think this thread is great (not crap).

Arch is really good. It would be my favorite if it wasn't for Dropline Gnome on Slack.


Arch is more simple than slackware. Installing Arch is like LFS. Very very little is included, including headers. However, packages are not seperated into -dev packages. Doing a pacman -S kde will install KDE, X11, and the development headers.(unless of course you already have X11 installed, then it wont) From there, if you want to remove KDE do a pacman -Rcs kde and it will remove KDE, everything that depends on KDE, and everything that KDE depends on that isn't being used by another package.

It's really quite nice. Lets say you want to remove X11 on slackware. Very difficult. You can removepkg the individual packages, but that will take forever, and chances are you'll have programs left. If you do a pacman -Rcs xorg, it'll remove Xorg, everything that Xorg depends on that isn't being used by anything else, and everything that depends on Xorg(of course it will also tell you what it is going to remove before it does it, so you know if you are about to do something stupid)


I think arch takes the best from slackware and gentoo, and leaves out the worst from slackware and gentoo.

I will say first that I am a happy Slacker and have been for many years. I installed and used Arch a couple of times. There have been some rather strange comments so far that makes me wonder if some of the posters have actually used Arch or Slackware.

Overall I would say using Arch was a positive experience. It installed well. Pacman is a great piece of work. I had a couple problems with it however. The first is its use of file hierarchy for installing files. I am used to having my apps installed to /usr/bin. I also had some problems with compiling non official packages. I suspect it was just dependency problems but since I was just trying out the distro I didn't waste a lot of time trying to solve the problem. If I was looking for a distro and had to have an automatic package management system with dependency checking, I would go with FreeBSD or Debian.

The thing is, with Slackware I always have the feeling that I have a ton of unused packages. I just would like a system that would check this for me and only install the ones necessary. But I don't want it to be like Debian which will bitch with custom packages because you have randompackage-1.2.12 instead of randompackage1.2.11. So how nazi is this dependency checking of Pacman?

edit. Oh I know apt's warnings can be ignored. It's just not very cool to have warning messages everytime I use it.

hi there,
interesting thread..
that is the interesting thing and a big difference between (Arch+Slackware) x (Debian+Gentoo): the "vanilla" approach. you don't have a lot of patches packages and "heavy" dependency checks in Arch+Slackware. Pacman uses the performance of C++ with a light package structure. the result: speed.
regards,
slackie1000

Why is this thread even on the Slack forum? And why are so many 'commited' Slack users so happy to diss the distro that holds true to it's Nix roots.
Come on people, let just agree that the two are different, but that Slack still rules!

Because I wanted to ask Slackware users who've *used* both distros what they think about Arch. I thought it would be a nice perspective because these distros are quite similar, but have quite a few differences as well.

That should tell you that I rate Slackware quite highly. I cannot understand why some Slackware users should feel the need to say "Slackware rules" all the time or feel threatened whenever somebody makes a honest comparison.

Similarly if other people start "dissing" Slackware, I cannot help it.

If you want this thread to be moved to the main distributions forum, feel free to report this thread to a moderator to move it out of here.

you *can* do a very basic slackware install without all the extra stuff -- you can do basically anything you want with slack. and it is mega-stable, too. i think arch is easier/faster to deal with if you want something minimal, though. pacman handles everything very cleanly. and it's the fastest distro i've ever used. with very few exceptions i have found the community there extremely helpful (and accurate) with every problem i've ever had. but the wiki covers most everything anyway, so i've never really had to be on the forums much. maybe there's a lot that goes on there or a lot of "attitude" that i just haven't detected. overall, i'd say it's one of the better linux distros out there. and to think it's not even at version 1 yet.

Thank you for the thread I have found the discussion very interesting.

Slackware is my favorite distro. It is the distro I always come back to. I can't really put it into words except the distro just feels right.

It is solid a s a rock. On most systems I run slack+fluxbox and my oldest box still runs fast.

I have tried arch and I like it also. same goes for gentoo-debian-ubuntu. If slackware had a 64 bit offering I would use it on all my boxes.

I used Slackware for well over a year before switching over to Arch back in March. A lot of the things I liked about Slack are also true of Arch.

If you took Slackware, optimised it for i686 (so that it's even faster than Slack's already impressive speed), used bleeding-edge packages, and added modern package management (which is done very well), you wouldn't be far from Arch. Much as I loved Slack, I love Arch even more.

But if you were thinkng of trying it, you might want to wait until the 0.7.1 release. Installing from a 0.7 CD will leave you with a few ideosyncracies (DevFS for example) that have since been removed, and may cause you headaches when you try to update.

While we're getting rid of the capability to run on older machines, and tossing out the package management system lets just throw out the init system for a total SysV Init style. Then Pat can start using custom patches on kernels for experimental features and experimental patches on packages. Hell, then he can go ahead and start having things install to completely asinine places and putting conf files in the dumbest places possible so that doing the simplest tasks takes forever.

There's distro's that already do all this crap. Slackware is Slackware. Suggesting anything otherwise makes no sense.

BTW, if you look at versions of packages that slackware has in it's repository you can see that it has very new software for a distribution who's philosophies are "simplicity and stability". It lives up to this philosophy exceedingly well too.

And yes, there is a slackware 64bit version. It's called slamd64 although I've never used it. I believe there is a thread in here already about it.

I use slackware on my mobile pentium laptop, runs like a champ. On my 3.8g amd64 I am using the slamd64 port of slack. I can use all slackpackages, or compile most software from source to make use of any 64bit goodies i can squeeze out of them. I would like to have prelinking for added speed boost, but from my gentoo install, I didn't see that great an increase from this feature.

Yes. That DevFS thing actually caused me to destroy my Debian installation the first time I did it some time back. After that I put away the Arch CD for a long time and used it only recently. But this time, I was more careful, I guess!

So have you tried Arch Linux? I only wanted opinions on Arch Linux from Slackware users who've tried Arch Linux.

I never said a word against Slackware and I don't see anybody advocating that Slackware be changed the way it is...

There is no slackware 64 was my point.

Slamd64 is an unoffical port of Slackware. It had a lot of bugs when I last used it.

I was not even replying to you. Thank you very much.