I'm curious about dedicated Debian users who've tried Slackware. What have been your experiences with Slackware?

What was your impression with Slackware and did you return to Debian? And what were the reasons for your choice?

Myself, I tried Slackware and somehow I was not comfortable using it, for several reasons, but mostly because I missed the "fuzzy" Debian feeling, if you can relate to what I mean

I want to install Slackware on my second hard disk, but it's conflicting with my desire to give FreeBSD another go (after some initial problems with X, I have to decide whether to reinstall it or not).

Debian's update mechanism is better, that is the sole reason I returned to Debian from any distro.

Debian is very good, it is very nice once installed, updates are really easy.
Slackware makes you learn the linux way, Debian the Debian way. Both are
good, but Slackware tends to give you an "overall" approach Debian is missing.
Anyway, they are the two best distros I have tested so far. I'll keep with them
both, whatever happens.
I think the three OSs that impressed me most are : Debian, Slackware and FreeBSD.

Every other distro seems to "hover around" these, if you see what I mean.

I have one Debian and one Slackware server. Slackware is my desktop distro.

I feel like I have much more control over the entire system with Slackware, but Debian's package management (APT and DPKG) is go good that I like Debian more than Slackware on a server.

I have slackware on my hard disk. It just has a different package management. Didn't find much difference. Played around a bit with x.org but in the end it feels kind of the same. Once it's working and looks like the way I want it to look I don't change much. Both are fine but since I have debian already completely as I want it I don't really feel like doing the same all over again in slack. Sometimes I login in slack just to play around a bit but not much more.

edit: I use the command line a lot in debian so there was not much new in slack for that either.

Yup. My two favorite distributions are slackware and debian, and for the exact same reasons as above, debian is easier to manage as a server. The advantage that I feel that slackware has over debian, is that sometimes debian package maintainers get a little overzealous with package dependancies, so you end up having a few extra packages laying around that you don't need. If you use X + kde or gnome, this means really cluttered menus.

On a server, tho, it's a lot easier to maintain and upgrade with apt-get.

I tried slackware few years ago. I think it was 8.1 or something. Installing it was less painfull to me compared to debian at the time. I was able to get it running quickly. I didn't like the package management among other things. I tried again 9.0 and used slackware current for about one month. swaret upgraded my kernel, boot failure, i couldn't believe it would touch the kernel. Linuxpackages stuff broke few files too. I would say i wasn't very impressed by slackware but i would rather use it than any rpm distros.

On the server side my first choices come to freebsd and debian. I want to be able to maintain it easily with ports/packages quickly.

I've installed Slackware 10 in my second hard disk again. This time, I think I should be able to give it a better try because:

1. I have enabled hotplug - so no longer any module loading problems. I made the mistake of disabling hotplug when I first installed Slackware and I had a lot of problems regarding modules/drivers etc.
2. I am going to use the 2.4.26 kernel for now. No more recompiling.
3. I am going to try updating to 10.1.

This second time my Slackware experience is much better because I am conscious that it's a different OS from Debian and that I have to learn new ways of doing things.

I guess the first time I was not prepared for Slackware because Debian had made me very comfortable indeed and I was finding it difficult to adjust to Slackware.

I returned very quickly to Debian after my encounter with terrible slow dropline gnome mirrors. I did like the simpler init system, and faster boot. I hope Debian will modernize it's init system after sarge has released.

Actually it always comes down to these things:
Slack is great because of it's simplicity and speed, it's built to be that way. The most annoying thing about slack is it's lack of a decent package manager, stuff like swaret don't really work that great on slack. Overal slack is very lean and gives you about the highest amount of control I had on any distro.
Debian most important advantage is and stays apt, it is a truly great tool and in combination with the massive repositories, it gives you a very easy system to maintain. But it is some loss of control as well, though a lot of people don't really care about this.

Both distro's are both great as a server and desktop system, but have a different vision on how they should provide this to the user. Slack == simplicity, Debian == ease of use.

grtz,
elluva

elluva,

I think you have summed up pretty well. It's a different set of priorities and it's not always a conflict. It's just different - the way the two distros are built and the target audience is slightly different though both distros tend to serve the "geekier" end of the Linux population.

I think the Debian philosophy is to maintain an operating system (not necessarily Linux. You have Debian GNU/HURD, GNU/FreeBSD) should be build to maintain itself with very little user intervention or none at all in some cases. Slackware aims to hand over complete control to the user. The user is held responsible for anything that happens on the box once Slackware is installed.

Debian believes in implementing policies - Slackware simply gives control of the policies to the user.

Both are suited for different sets of people.

On a more general note, Slackware is out-and-out Linux at its heart. Debian moves to implement the GNU ideal: a Free Operating System which can be used by the masses (might be any kernel as I mentioned) that strictly implements the philosophies and principles of the GNU community and maintains the standards at that end.

I think that at some level you might interpret this as an extension of the differences between Open Source and Free Software.

One indication of this difference is that Patrick J. Volkerding, the lead developer of Slackware, prefers to publish his code under the BSD license, as I recently learned.
http://frugalware.org/about.php

Ah, thank you Dead Parrot. Very interesting piece of information. I wasn't aware of this.

i was a slackware usr

slackware is good but now i moved to debian for some reasons

i use many software like inkscape, mplayer, ogmtools and so many other software

and if i wanna install everything from source it will take my all time and for update also and the precompiled pkgs that unofficial often do not work after change kernel (i do not know why)

in debian just apt-get upgrade do all

and debian has a big usr and developer community
the debian is really coool..........


i personally think there should 3 linux distro

1. debian (for all)
2. gentoo / slackware (for source lover)
3. easy than windows distro ()

Swaret is not an official tool and using 3-d party software to manage your system may(will) brake things. The same can be aplied for linuxpackages. So the problems you've experienced were not really with slackware itself. But hey, it's not fun without stuff braking once in a while isn't it