Slackware: Viable on a desktop?
 

I am thinking of installing slackware as a desktop OS, and I have a few questions.

How good is Slack on the desktop?
Is there an easy way to maintain packages? (eg synaptic)
Does it have multimedia support?
How is the support for peripheral devices?
How is the plug & play support?



Thanks for your advice.

My advice to you would be to try it. Slackware is SUPERB and will do anything you want it to do. You will have to be prepared to work at it though. Enjoy.

Slackware is a manually configured distribution compared to PCLinuxOS, which you have cited as your current distribution. It will do all the things you list, but it will not do them "out of the box" or "at the end of the initial install." To accomplish this, you need to configure a number of things after the installation.

This brings to mind a question--what advantages do you seek by looking at a distribution like Slackware?

I am simply seeking a desktop that seems stable and fast and powerful. I have tried all variants of Ubuntu, Gentoo, and all other popular distros. PCLinux seems to me quite buggy and it freezes often, as well as lacking some power features I have grown to love in distros like SUSE and Fedora. Also, the distros mentioned above dont really like my computer. Anyway, thatnks for the feedback, I'm downloading Slackware now.

don't forget to read the slackbook

Moved: This thread is more suitable in the Slackware forum and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

slackware is very suitable for a desktop under certains conditions :

- You will spend a lot more time that with *buntu and other desktop distributions to have what you like, but once it's done it will be the desktop you want, not the distribution's desktop.
- You won't have some package manager like apt or synaptics but with some slackbuilds you'll have something a lot more flexible.
- And last but not least, slackware is rock solid, so will be you're desktop if you don't install some strange packages downloaded on the internet.

You'll find lots of quality slackbuilds on slackbuilds.net and slackbuilds.org.

I've been using Slackware as my daily desktop for over two years now, with no complaints. It just plain works.

It does all of those things "out of the box" for me!

The only tweaking I _need_ to do for most desktops is adding proprietary stuff like NVIDIA drivers (although, again, this is not absolutely necessary because the native nv works fine for most things) and questionable programs like libdvdcss to read encrypted dvds. But I think that would be true of most distros.

I think the idea that Slack requires a lot of work/effort to get up and running is a relic of the past. It is true that you have less gui config tools, but that does not mean it is any _harder_ to configure (how hard is it to edit a text file?)

And you _do_ have automated package managers available if you really want them (but IMO they are much more trouble than they're worth). Also, the OP said "maintain packages" not "install packages", and you can stay on top of official package upgrades and patches quite easily with, eg. slackpkg.

Brian

The differences between PCLinuxOS and Slackware are easily explained by the differing philosophies of their chief maintainers. Texstar tends to keep a lot of up-to-date software (aka buggy new releases) in his releases. Pat on the other hand, waits until things are established. As far as I could tell as long as I was a PCLinuxOS user (and a happy one), Texstar's main goal is to convert users of other operating systems, or at least to show that Linux can be made into a good desktop. I think he's done a damn good job of proving that: he converted me after a bad week with my first installs (Mepis, Ubuntu and FreeBSD).

Pat's goal in providing Slackware, on the other hand, is to provide a stable, Unix-like Linux distribution that people can rely upon for servers, workstations or whatever else they need it for. There is a much greater diversity in the audience of Slackware, and I think everyone benefits from that. This means that Slackware is the ultimate server distro, ultimate Workstation distro, ultimate desktop distro...

My own personal story is that I was converted with PCLinuxOS and after a while it got hard to administrate. Having used Slackware on an extra partition and at work, I changed it over. The biggest difference was that I had to set things up a little more to make it pretty, whereas PCLinuxOS comes with a customized KDM theme and a customized desktop, and other niceties aimed toward desktop use. There is, however, a huge amount of "desktop" software included in Slackware, and 12.0 includes lots of conveniences like HAL.

I think the lack of any "official" Slackware wallpaper for KDE epitomizes the difference: Slackware is what you make of it. PCLinuxOS is a prettier package, on the other hand.

Joel

I've been using Slackware since 10.2 and I have to say it is highly suited for desktop use, precisely because it doesn't hold your hand and do administrative tasks for you. It is how I envision an OS should operate, without much overhead, and only running the computer, not trying to be everything to everyone, and above all else, FULLY CUSTOMIZABLE. It's simplicity and faith to Unix (i.e. text edited config files) make it very diverse.

Just a note: I've been using Slackware since February (I started with Slackware 11.0 and then switched to 12.0 a little while after it came out) and it has never crashed on me. Ever. Then again I've never given any other distro a very fair chance, so I'm not sure how often they crash -- but Slackware is very stable at least for me. KDE includes most of the utilities you'll ever want/need for a desktop PC (although there are definitely some things you'll want [like mplayer]).

That is almost not possible. I suspect that for many of us, X won't even run until you configure it with xorgconfig. (It never has for me.) Then, unless you want to boot to the command line all the time, you need to change the default runlevel.

Once that is done, you have to add users, which is not part of the default setup (via the setup command), add Flash player for the browser, set up a way to automount USB (since using the command line to mount and umount a USB device each time is not "plug and play"), etc. Then, adding peripheral devices like a printer requires running CUPS. In other words, you need to configure a number of things after the installation. Someone coming from a PCLinuxOS background would not plan to see much of this except maybe printer setup.

It is possible and has been working this way for me since Slackware 10.x, I believe. Maybe your vidcard and/or monitor has obscure settings that prevent this?

That's not a need. That's a want. I use the default runlevel, because I usually don't care how I access my machine...most of the time is spent in CLI anyways.

I agree with this. It's a 'best practice' type of thing but isn't essential in getting a machine to work.

A want, not a need...

A want, not a need...

Suppose this is a server in a server farm? Suppose you don't want to serve printed pages...this is a want, not a need.

Most of this is highly subjective. It totally depends on the mission of the machine and each individual's needs and wants.

Setting up Slackware the way you want is more work than with Ubuntu.
I ran Ubuntu for more than a year and it's an easier distro for beginners.
But, once configured exactly the way you want, Slackware is eeeeeeeaaasy... ;)
Solid, fast, safe and very little hassle on keeping the system up-to-date.
And therefor very suitable as a desktop.