We've got src2pkg to help with stuff not available elsewhere as SlackBuilds or packages.

I agree that Mint would be better for someone who wants an out-of-the-box-experience, but Slack isn't as old-fashioned or as difficult as some people portray it.

1 members found this post helpful.

*sigh*

ok..

All these years I used slack only because it gave me freedom and didn't take it away from me in the name of being "user-friendly" like most distros. I still think slack is not user-friendly, the OP will find out when he has to edit configuration files to get his system up and running. A simple example is runlevel. User-friendliness depends on the user itself.

Slack is old-fashioned and that's the beauty of it imho! It has the same old installer and has not compromised it for some fancy GUI, live CD/DVD and ootb compiz cube effects. That's what makes slack so great, it is a serious distro for serious people. You can configure the hell out of it as you want. Although there are talks in the thread "What changes you want to see in future" about having more eye-candy and the cool factor to attract more users, it will totally go against the KISS philosophy of Slackware.
/rant

Yeah, I agree with everything you say. Stop sighing now.

Lol! This is actually what I meant to say. Damn my confusing words!

The ncurses interface(mentioned by brianL) is pretty nice; I guess that's a GUI I use frequently.

Yikes, there's a whole other debate in itself- the relative user-friendliness of GUI v. CLI interfaces for various tasks. I'll just leave that one alone, if that's ok!

Now I'm curious, so I'll check Mint out soon; I have a spare partition it can use.

@mudangel

The only thing bugs me about Mint is that the 64bit support comes out late, the KDE and XFCE[?] is community-built. Other than that, if you have no problem with it or with Gnome then give it a try. It's pretty cool. And it has worked better than Karmic for me and everyone I gave it to.

Since Mint is basically Ubuntu, see Slackware vs. Ubuntu

I don't imagine it'll be replacing my Slackware, but it's fun to play with different stuff sometimes. The OpenSolaris live CD was pretty cool for that.

i guess i should have clarified myself. i meant user-friendly as far as people having an easy GUI and things clickable as opposed to typing in commands.

Mint makes sense for someone who doesn't have internet. It ships with everything you need which would grant you a similar experience from a store bought PC.

Slackware makes sense for inquisitive people. It ships with all development tools, source code, documentation, and a book. It's a college on a disc.

If you decide to compile the glibc and kernel to meet specifications of your processor and other hardware then you'll need the internet for Mint to download the kernel and glibc sources. Where as in Slackware you already have them.


Slackware people tend not to update. Where as Mint will announce updates for the kernel and applications automatically.


As Miyamoto Musashi said you have to learn through pratice not just reading. To that end I didn't know much about configuring laptop keyboards until I ran Ubuntu and studied the acpi scripts from Debian. Slackware didn't support my keyboard function keys.

You are typically on your own. But that fits with old mentalities. If you are worthy for enlightenment you'll find it through your own means not by others'.

So I wouldn't confine myself to one operating system.

good luck

Hi Vex390

Now, just a minor but nonetheless interesting question :

You have a system, with lots of features/Functions, keyboard locale, network settings, media mount options, etc.

And you have one gui per action, this is typically the Windouzer Mindset... can you change every occurence of the word 'Yamato' in text files to 'Senkan Yamato' in say, 20000 files, using GUI...?

In Unix/Linux you can do it quite easily with grep and awk/sed using a little bash script...
That is the power of command line

The UNIXer/Linuxer mindset is using ONE control interface to perform ALL, administrative tasks, and lots of other tasks in your system : The CLI.

Note the difference : SEVERAL apps/GUIs vs ONE app/CLI to perform the same objective...

I think that the "clicking" mindset is a heritage from M$... while the "scripting" mindset has a longer tradition, stemming from the first programmable computers in existence, the IBM's of the 50's...



Did you know BTW that you can run things like Spreadsheet applications in console, or text processing applications, or more specifical engineering applocations from command line only ?

True... Did you know that you can watch a movie in a "window" in console using GNU Screen, to output the *avi ( more formats AFAIK ) to an ascii-art movie, using aaxine...? or surf the web in console using w3m or Links...?



Of course, if you are not yet proficient enough to "play" with console/GNU-Screen in your machine, or needing X11 support, stuff like ion, ratpoison, or awesome window managers, or if Eye Candy is a must for you, you can always resort to a full featured Desktop Manager, like XFCE/Gnome/KDE...

But i repeat, GUI applications are not the core of system management in Unix/Linux...

And if you really want to learn how to use Unix/Linux, you should not fear CLI...

Go for Slackware, or Arch or Crux...

.... but if you are really warrior, go for BLFS....

BRGDS

Alex


Edit: User Friendliness does not mean knowledge or Empowerment... most of the times it will mean exactly the opposite, Bushi Do is not "User-Friendly"....

Mint is great if you want everything too just work,Slackware makes you understand how it works and why! And for a dual boot solution they work fine for anybody who wants to really learn Gnu/linux but sometimes just need things to work.

I would disagree to an extent. The Unix philosophy, as stated by Dough McIlroy - the inventor of 'piping' commands, wrote

The likes of sort, cut, uniq, wc, grep, and sed are programs that adhere to the Unix philosophy. (Awk to an extent, but awk's more of a programming language).

At the time, the Unix philosophy related to the command line - but that's because CLI is all there was.
Adapting it to the GUI, many programs "do one thing and do it well". Mplayer's a good example - the basic program decodes video but does not include an interface, which is provided by other programs. It's not so clear what the GUI's universal interface should be - copy-and-paste is one. DBUS could be another.

A little earlier in late summer/early fall of 2010, I did something I never thought I'd ever get around to doing: Installing Slackware on my Asus G50V laptop.

Slackware 13.37 64bit GNU/Linux, to be exact! (And Mr. Stallman loves the GNU part ;-})

Anyway, I wiped an entire ubuntu 11.04 system off into the space-between-spaces and started with a fresh partition, all ready to go. So what happened? Well...I began by observing that Slackware utilized a text-based installer. No problems there, I started with Mandrake a number of years ago and it was all text back then. Nothing new here.

Loaded Linux into memory, logged in to root, then ran setup.

After poking around the menu system a bit, it became obvious what was going on, so I went to install Everything (with a Capital E!)
A few gigabytes later, I logged in to a command prompt, ran startx, and was using kde in a very short time.

Compressing the rest of my experience into a few lines: Over the course of the next month, I was doing everything in Slackware. I introduced myself in #slackware on Freenode IRC, got great feedback and insights to things I wasn't familiar with in a short time, was using slackbuilds.org for just about everything--as well as compiling a few things from source code I needed, too. Since it was the 64bit version of Slack, I also set up Multilib on my system--something I thought would be daunting, at first, but which turned out to be not so difficult, after all. 32-bit was up and running, too!

I'm a troubleshooter, so it wasn't hard to figure out what needed to be where by reading the directions a few times, making a few errors, re-thinking the issue, then having another go at it. I was actually enjoying the process, and I haven't seen any GNU/Linux distro compile source code as fast as I've seen Slackware 13.37 64bit GNU/Linux do it! It stimulated my learning processes for the first time in years, and I only wiped Slack off the G50V because my wife was used to ubuntu, so I did it to make it easier for her.

Looking back in hindsight, I'm wondering if it was really that much of a time-saver, though, to remove Slack, and lately I'm wondering if I should to back to Slack. Hmmm... (This thing has space for two hard disks, so I'm saving up to buy a slack-only drive for it!)

Okay, that's my post. I love Debian and it's spin-offs. I love Slackware now, too. Experiment, and use what works for you.

Peace Out!--Firefishe