I stumbled upon Slackware mainly because I am helping out a friend with a Slackware distribution. I like to help friends out when they ask which Linux distro is best. Now I know that everyone's need is likely to be different and so there is no "ultimate" distro.

This leads to the question: why do you like Slackware? What are its advantages, and what are the disadvantages. Keep in mind that all responses are purely opinions. I really don't want to start a giant flamewar. Just be civil and speak your opinions and do not trash other people's opinions.

On another note, I wish that distro would post why people would pick their distro. It would be nice to list their selling point and what their target audience is. Ideally, one should try a few distro before selecting one that fits best. In reality, no one has the time.

Paul

People use Slack for a lot of reasons. I like it because it's comfortable to me, I find it easy to use in a near default configuration (at least I don't have to undo a lot of defaults to get something I find nice), and manually resolving package dependencies holds a certain kind of charm. On that last point though, I wouldn't use it for anything other than my own, personal systems unless I really knew what I was doing. Then again Red Hat Enterprise 3 AS has given me more trouble with dependencies than Slackware ever has. Go figure.

Well, if this thread doesn't become one, I'll eat my hat.
I did, and continue to do so as new distros are released. See, when I was partitioning my drives I made a spare partition which enables me to install another distro alongside my "daily driver" and take it for a quick test run. Most distros are quick & easy to install these days, and I can usually tell after 15 minutes if I like them or not...

Anyhow, this topic has been done to death on these forums. Have a browse if you want people's opinions, because you will find plenty to read.

I will say this: People can say whatever they like about Slackware. It works for me, and that's all I care about. Simplicity is the key to everything in life.

for me there are many reasons to prefer slack
among them are:
1.slack is highly customizable and tunable
2.slack is very stable
3.if understood, it's a powerfull TOOL, to do anything you desire
etc
i've tried out many distros, so far slack seems to be the best (for me)

hi paulsiu,

hm, there are lots of reasons why I mainly use Slackware.
Let's see if I can give you a few:


- Slackware is the oldest maintained distribution to date.
Patrick Volkerding has done and is still doing an EXCELLENT job on upgrading and improving Slackware.. Can't go wrong with that

- Slackware uses BSD style init scripts
this has been mainly incorporated since Slackware 7.0 and I just simply love it. It's so much easier to keep it all together under one roof rather than having scripts for each runlevel seperately as many other distributions do it.

- Editing config files manually rather than depending on GUI
I am not sure what it is, but I've always been fond of editing config files, and to actually see and know what you're doing on your system. Many other distributions just don't challenge a linux user to "learn" as much as they could because they keep using GUI to makes changes to their system. What do you do when GUI breaks and you need to fix something? There you have it...learn it the PV's way from the start and you won't regret it

- Slackware is a cool name for a distribution!
that pretty much says it all

- Maintaining dependencies on your own
just as zytsef posted previously. There is nothing wrong with manually resolving dependencies issues. You know what you need, you know where to get things, you add or remove just about the essential for your system to get things working. Once you have the major dependencies required by most applications, that issue is almost not existent.

- 2.4 stock kernel just works
I know most other distributions already come with stock 2.6 kernels. It sure is nice to have better and improved features for your system, but the idea Patrick is using is simply stated THE RIGHT WAY. 2.4 works on most computers and I've never had a problem installing slackware on a system whether it's 7 years old or whether it's 9 months ago. You always have the option to get your own kernels upgraded which is what I also love about Slackware.

- keep it simple, stable, flexible and powerful!
what more can you ask of your linux distribution?


There are many more reasons, but these are the ones that just came to mind right when I started posting :P

It's simple for me.

Package management. I can create and replace packages as needed, and i can put anything i want into a package, and a package is nothing more than a gzipped tarball. If only there was a way to implement dependency resolution(Not like RPM, just warnings, IE: "WARNING: This package says it recommends "GTK2", but you don't have it installed, the package may not work as the packager intended.")

That way you can at least see if you are missing something. ldd is not always good enough.



And that is about all i like. It's not super stable, i certainly wouldn't use it on a serious server or as a corporate workstation. Old does not equal good, Slackware does not use bsd init scripts as they are in BSD. Use BSD if you want bsd init scripts, sometimes guis are faster than config files. (Cups is FAR easier and FAAAAARRRR faster to configure using localhost:637 than to edit the files in /etc/cups/(not to mention that ALL distros come with vi, and ALL distros can be configured from a terminal, that is inherently unix)

Solaris is a far cooler name than Slackware(which ultimately sounds pretty lame, i can't tell people i use slackware without getting laughed at(Especially in crowds who don't know anything outside of windows), but if i use Solaris i sound cool) and 2.6 is BETTER than 2.4 in every single way. THere is no reason to ship it. It is not more stable than 2.6, especially on x86, it is slower, it offers worse hardware support, it is less customizable, etc. etc. etc. Not as suitable for server or desktop as 2.6 is anymore.

But installpkg is pretty nice. Except for the dependency warning i wish it had. (I usually put an ldd in my doinst.sh of my custom made packages, since usually i'll make them and won't need them again for up to 6 months, and i'll completely forget dependencies)


EDIT: Having said that, Slackware is my distro of choice, and i do indeed generally approve of it.

Hmmmm... Let's just say Slackware has been around longer than any other existing distro. Which means that: (a) Patrick Volkerding knows what he is doing and (b) that he must be doing something right, since Slackware is still around... ;-)

Have you ever used pkg-config for that purpose? Seems to work well when compiling from source from what I've seen of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slackware




sorry but I just had to post this :P

Nevertheless, we're all still happy slackers and once you go slack, you never go back is somewhat true in most instances

I'll give a specific example.

Nihongo benkyo depends on Ruby-gnome.

I created a package for ruby-gnome, and then installed it, and then created a package for nihongo benkyo and installed it.

About 8 months later i did a reinstall, but kept my packages for quick reinstallation. I looked through ~/packages and installed what i wanted to keep(what i didn't view as cruft). I viewed ruby-gnome as cruft because i completely forgot that nihongobenkyo depended on it.


When i went to startup nihongobenkyo, it obviously didn't start. A simple warning would have been enough to prevent me from having to spend more time buildint ruby gnome again. (ldd didn't work because ruby apps are not dynamic executables)

My workaround now is to just manually put in dependencies in the slack-desc

PS: I know that Slackware uses a BSD-like init system, but i can tell you it is not nearly as powerful as the init systems in Free/OpenBSD. It just follows a similar policy. (I do think that slackware scripts are better than sysvinit in almost all applications, but i also think that BSD scripts as done in BSD are better than in slackware)

Would you care to expand on this?

No 3rd party support.

Nobody to call if something goes horribly wrong, nobody to call if you are just scared.

It doesn't matter how good or bad a distro is, on a serious server you are going to want either Redhat or Debian, since the "professionals" with the fancy degrees are trained to use those. And every company wants to hire professionals...

And this has precisely what to do with stability?

Personally, I've never had a problem I couldn't solve myself with a bit of Googling or even asking questions here. There are several thousand Slackware servers running worldwide without problems. I intend to set it up in our office as a file & print server once I have learned enough to be confident in doing so (I am an accountant by trade).

And if you are "just scared" should you really be administering a Linux server??

I don't mean stability as in it won't crash, (As apache is apache, and apache on one distro is not necessarily less prone to crashing than another), but as in stable like Debian stable, where everything is stable and predictable.

You get X amount of time for a security update. Always, under any circumstances. With Slackware, you get random updates. Some people say it's 4 years, but it's entirely random. Pat puts in security updates when he feels like it. Fine for a desktop or a system that stays on the latest stable release, but a company wants to know, they want to mark their calenders 5, 6, sometimes 10 years in advance. They want to know EXACTLY when they will not be supported anymore.

In other words. I don't EVER remember reading anything about slackware 8.0 no longer being supported, but it hasn't receieved an update in years. But 8.1 is still supported. And i have NO idea when pat will stop updating 8.1. Companies don't want that.

The boss of *insert company here* company views their servers as, "If something goes wrong i can call 10000 people in to fix it, each with verifiable degrees and each certified to do it."

The mentallity is there probably due to horrible operating systems from the 90s, but you can't deny that it is there. I have never, EVER been into an office that used slackware. But i've been to many that have the latest enterprise offerings from Redhat or Novell.

I don't understand the problem. It's easy to use the test26.s kernel during installation. Then it's just one more step to use installpkg for the 2.6 kernel modules. Having a choice works fine for me.