Partially back on Linux after five years, solving a WiFi issue... and it's not Slackware, sadly.
 

(This might well be in the wrong subforums. Please move this topic as you wish.)

So, as some of you had probably already thought, I didn't really fit here initially, having got rid of stubborn GNU/Linux on both my servers and laptops in 2012. There were severe problems even with so-called "stable" distributions like Debian (which was what powered my servers back then), leading to systems that would have required serious work to boot again.

I finally got fed up and pulled the plugs, replacing my Debian servers by FreeBSD (later, OpenBSD) and purging my Fedora laptop partition, leaving my Windows intact.¹

But, as I randomly travel to congresses and other conventions, I like to take a more dumbed down laptop with me, preferably encrypted, so I can take notes, write blog articles, surf the web, process my e-mail and brag about not using GNU/Linux.² Over the past few years, an ancient(ish) 32-bit ThinkPad with OpenBSD served me well for this, but it does indeed start to show its age: it is slow and loud and just not nice anymore. As the next convention will be in two weeks, I talked myself into getting a new machine for "surfing, e-mails et cetera", this time 15 instead of 14 inches. (I find 14 inches to be too small, especially on Ancient ThinkPad³ resolutions.) A cheap Acer Aspire ES15 should do, or so I thought. This machine is not really built to run something else than Windows from UEFI, but somehow I found out how to get into and modify the BIOS; my, these boot firmwares are damn fast these days.)

My initial plan to take the chance to dig into illumos was shiny (Tribblix does seem to be a rock-solid no-frills desktop system), but one of the most relevant pieces of hardware in the laptop, the WiFi chipset, is unsupported. It happens to be some newer Atheros (ath10k), which sounds easy enough. "Well then", I said, "illumos is probably not staffed with WiFi maintainers. Let's try something else."⁴ So I tried the battle-tested OpenBSD, proven to be compatible with anything that remotely resembles laptop hardware, and - no WiFi.

Huh?

After some DuckDuckGoing, I found that this particular chipset is mostly unsupported by anything except Windows and Linux with FreeBSD support coming "soon" (probably FreeBSD 12); thus, given the narrow time frame, my only real choices were Windows and a Linux, and I still don't intend to run Windows on my portable web machines. But which Linux?

Coincidentally, I randomly recommend Slackware to people who insist on trying Linux. My exact words are usually: If I'll ever need to choose a Linux again, I'll choose Slackware. Now there was the time to live up to my decisions. Hooray... well, good thing there's ##slackware. (Hat tip to the great greybeards who seem to reside there and randomly leave their caves to answer stupid questions.)

The WiFi worked out of the box!

But I did experience problems on my Slackware trip:

1. lilo didn't want to be installed. Multiple times. Repeating the Slackware installation five times in the exactly same way finally worked. Please don't ask me why.
2. The touchpad doesn't work (Advanced Mode) or only works with left-click (Basic Mode) which would be fine for me if I hadn't preferred to run Window Maker on it⁵ which does make use of right-click menus.
3. The package ecosystem is confusing, to say the least. slackpkg+ is really helpful, but it still excludes SlackBuilds. Also, regularly missing dependencies make it harder to keep track of installed software while keeping the overhead low. (Installing dependencies for dependencies of software which you just want to try once is not really something I would recommend to anyone if I had the choice.)
4. Even respecting third-party repositories, some of my preferred software (e.g. qutebrowser and neomutt) wasn't officially ported to Slackware yet. Compiling much of my userland myself would probably lead to serious issues for Slackware 15.0 or 14.3, whenever the libraries would become incompatible next. I knew that, at least, from my FreeBSD servers.

While the first issue somehow fixed itself and I - coming from the BSDs - am perfectly fine with finding my ways around the package-related ones, the touchpad problem broke Slackware's neck for me. There were a couple of hints both on the IRC and on the web, none of which really solved my issue; one even disabled my trackpad completely. This was a frustrating experience for me. As I didn't have anything important stored on this laptop yet, I decided to start all over again. Maybe some other distribution would be less frustrating?

I had very few requirements for that: I'd prefer a system (well, Linux was the only real choice here) that

• comes without systemd (even with NixOS being an adorable systemd distribution, I was not interested in sharing the mostly negative experiences of other people),
• has a decent set of available packages and a package manager that is sophisticated enough to get out of my way,
• is unlikely to be abandoned soon (the systemd fiasco sew quite some one-hit wonders; Devuan, anyone?),
• comes with a small base set of applications (I mostly know what I need and I usually don't need more than that),
• is not based on Slackware (sorry, but I'd still prefer the original ... if the hardware works with it, that is).

That left me in the end with one choice: Void Linux.

I decided to install yesterdays's musl variation of Void Linux because I always wanted to have a good excuse to try how musl performs on an actual machine. I failed to install it in UEFI mode ("No bootable device", I guess I'll blame Acer), but good old legacy boot still works wonders.

Void Linux is lovely: No systemd, bleeding-edge software⁶, a decent set of available packages, no preinstalled bloat (I chose the base installation, not sure about the desktop spins) and - whyever - a working touchpad with two keys on X. The only issues I found were a missing ed(1) (seriously, why do people think that something as small and essential like ed should be packaged externally?) and missing dependencies for a very small subset of the applications I intended to use.

Now Void Linux is really different: No crontab, no iwconfig and the fastest boot I've witnessed on any machine I own. runit seems to be worth being read about. So, well, I'm back on Linux again, at least until FreeBSD 12. I'll try to enjoy the time, I promise.

Final thought: I would totally post this to the Void Linux forums, but their forum software sucks, so I rather won't register there. I still hope you enjoyed reading it.


---------[ LEGEND ]---------

¹ Yes, I'm very happy with that.
² Depending on where I go, this is something special. Don't take me too seriously here, neither do I anyway.
³ Is that a valid product name yet? If not, why not? Your chance, Lenovo or whatever your next name is!
⁴ You still should really try Tribblix unless you need Atheros support.
⁵ I switched to StumpWM on the same day, noticing that Window Maker works best with a mouse and attempting to work around the touchpad issue. I still like it a lot.
⁶ I am well aware that this will hurt me one day. Badly.

Followed the sig link to here. I understand about flavors of ice scream and druthers and being pragmatic and all that. Nice success story. I enjoyed the diversion.

@OP I agree with most of what you are writing here, and I enjoyed the void in the past but found it a bit unstable. Perhaps I need to revisit...

FWIW, I am in the process of purging Void in favor of, probably, Gentoo and/or Slackware. The reason for this is my own stupidity.
Just in case anyone is wondering about my changed profile.

You sound like you really want to go back to Slackware. If there is a distro that means something to you, for whatever reason, I find it is much better to weather all the difficulties which it may present until you make it your primary - or at least secondary - OS, rather than go to another distro and make do.

I will elaborate on my point. I can't address all of your four main points in your OP but I think I can address 3 and 4 mixed together as one.

As we have discussed earlier today, you and I, each distro has a specific ethic which underscores both its existence and its processes. Slackware also has an ethic - simplicity - which permeates its package management system.

As someone once said to me - and I may even sig it - Slack has a very specific focus, and it's not ease-of-use.

Yes, it is confusing. I am still learning how it works. But I'm getting there. There are primary repos [through slackpkg], third party [SlackBuilds] and then binaries [choose your binaries carefully]. You mention keeping track of installed software. It is possible to check exactly which packages are installed in slackpkg or that you have installed through SlackBuilds. Look:

https://docs.slackware.com/howtos:sl...alled_packages

If that's not enough - make a spreadsheet and note any time you install a package.

Why go through this?

It depends how much you care about the distro you are working with. If you really care about a distro and about advancing your learning versus being with another distro but wishing you were with Distro X, then you will put the time in.

Some context:

I first heard of Slackware in 2003. It stayed in my memory, though my first install of it wasn't until Aug 2017. The install didn't work how I wanted it to. I have since done at least ten test installs on VMs and secondary computers because it's important to me that I learn about it. I have now had it on my secondary computer for about a month and am getting quite comfortable with it. But I am still not totally comfortable with it yet. It's a longer process than say, getting comfortable with Ubuntu or even Debian. But I want to, it fascinates me, and I believe that I can. It's a goal. And those are the benchmarks for success.

Also, I will take a hit with some software it if doesn't work or exist. If package A doesn't compile properly or doesn't exist, I'll just accept it. All the crucial packages [LibreOffice, Spotify, PDF annotation software, Steam to an extent] do exist for me. I don't use iTunes or Photostop or have the need for any software like that.

The support here on LQ is also great. I have had help from some extremely knowledgeable posters on the Slackware sub-forum who have helped make the transition much smoother and who are consistently on-hand to assist with things that I find hard. I am very grateful [note: it's a good place to ask about the issues you experienced in points 1 and 2 that you made].

So the conclusion is twofold - by the sounds of it you really want to get back to Slackware. And how - and if - you do that depends on how much you want to and how much you will regret not doing so if you don't. My suggestion is to put it on a secondary/tertiary computer and go from there.

If it had worked for me in the first place, I wouldn't have gone anywhere eise.

You are not expected to. :)

The "simplicity" ethic is the leading reason why I even talk about Slackware as much as I do. I want my system to go out of my way, and Slackware (even more than Void which includes its own branding etc.) is perfect on that: It does exactly what I tell it to and nothing else. Technically, slackpkg does the right thing by not dragging in any dependencies without being asked to - I would prefer an option for it to do exactly that, though.

You mentioned third-party package management too - and here's where we obviously disagree with each other: It is nice to have third-party options (Slackware even supports Guix which looks like a decent replacement to me), but they are "officially unsupported" which means that they could disappear or break any time which is something that is largely undesirable for a production OS.

I lack fandom here. I don't care about any distro as long as it works. Void is fine because it (mostly) works, not because it happens to be Void. :)

I wish I could afford enough computers. ;)

After (mostly) throwing a dice between Gentoo and Slackware, I currently have a half-finished Gentoo installation on the ex-Void machine. The positive side from this indefinite excursion - if nothing else - might be that I'll need to understand how I can make the touchpad work on Slackware - at least point 2 might be solved then.

Out of the box, 3 ways to have Slack on your system, may or may not be perfect for your particular hardware.

(I used to use it at one time, but I regularly use AntiX these days.)

https://www.salixos.org/

Absolutly wrong 'pal' ( thus b\w quotation
marks ) !

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...5/#post5736087

:hattip:

I was a bit easy with words even, the system was annoying after a while, with all too many unexpected crashes. Some related to the distro's dep resolution (missing libs that caused others to exit) and some were just buggy applications, not related to the distro itself.
Still I like the idea behind the distro and will definitely try it again in the future.

I have had glibc Void installed on my laptops and desktop machines for several years without any problems. The musl library alternative is not as well supported with any installation not just Void.

That's what I have figured out too late.

Interesting. I will check up on 'Void Linux.'

Highly recommendable. :)

I suggest you take a look at AntiX, there are different versions for different uses/people, no systemd, light weight system using WMs, based on Debian, so has the most available packages also. :hattip: