Long-Time Listener, First-Time Caller
Hello to the broad community out there!
My subject reflects the sentiment of this post. Callers to the talk radio station I listen to in New Jersey frequently begin with "Hi, I love your show, I'm a long-time listener, first-time caller".
I'm an IT Manager by day and PC / home server hobbyist by night. Have been using LQ as a resource to answer my questions for years, but have never created an account. Figured it was finally time, especially since I now have a question of my own to ask that I can't find a clear answer to anywhere.
Was a casual Linux user dating back to the release of Red Hat 8.0 Psyche (2002) when I picked up a 3-CD set at a computer expo in central Pennsylvania and tried it out for the first time. Didn't decide to officially kick the Windows habit and run GNU/Linux as my daily driver until around the time Linux Mint 13 was released (2012).
Have run through a plethora of distros in my search of the "perfect" one over the last 8-10 years, but at long last I finally settled on Slackware 14.2 a couple years ago as my go-to for just about everything. It's the only distro I've found that truly respects me as a user by making very few assumptions about who I am and gives me the clear and concise documentation I need to set things up my way.
Yes, I will say that doing things the "Slackware way", not using a dependency-checking package management system like YUM/DNF or APT, and the lack of preinstalled automagical "point-and-click" utilities does prove to be a pain-in-the-rear at times (esp. when compiling a huge program from source), but Slackware has proven to me that it is the most stable and predictable on all my systems. And, it's also forced me to learn a whole lot more about the underlying components of GNU/Linux, which I've appreciated.
I still work with Debian regularly on the servers at my day job because that's what we've standardized on, but for everything else, there's Slackware!
I'm a tinkerer at heart, I break things a lot, and I depend on the Internet (especially LQ) to bail me out whenever I make a big mistake that the man pages aren't helping with. So my sincere thanks to everyone here who's already helped me out without even knowing it! Hoping that with time and experience I'll build enough knowledge that I can return the favor and be a help to others.
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