A note about the technology used on the Space Shuttle:

It was already considered "old" when it was selected, but that also means it's "proven." The tech may not be fool-proof, but the designers and engineers have a pretty good idea how it will break, and how it will behave after it breaks. That's something you want your humans to be able to handle on their own during a mission, since roadside assistance isn't an option.

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Dunno about that.

There's always a trade-off of some sort and the way you measure that trade off is by cost. Saving money here may make you spend more money there and piss clients off as well.

Fast delivery is not always a cheap delivery, if the thing you've delivered has to restart every hour with the disruption of client work implied by the same. Or you've skinned the VMs you've bought to the point where your total system cannot keep up with amount of data flowing in.

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Indeed! How about a round of applause in respectful acknowledgment of the youngster responsible for all of this wonderful Slackness, Patrick Volkerding!

The contrasts between Slackware, the ongoing product of one man's vision and continuity of purpose, and corporate Linux, provide many immediate examples of the schisms being somewhat wrongly classed as generational.

The evident foundations, technical and idealistic, on which Patrick has built and maintained Slackware are firmly rooted on the best ideas and visions of others, including of course Dennis Ritchie and friends! Patrick has remained true to those foundations while advancing them with his own vision, and the result speaks for itself! It is why we are here!

That does not make it "old", but it does differentiate it from all others! In that sense may we dare to think of Slackware as a kind of "trust" of the best ideas and visions of the age carefully tended and advanced into each future-present?

Thanks Pat!

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It is the same thing with the Orion capsule. The flight computer runs on a single core PowerPC processor from 2002. It runs at 900MHz, has a bus speed of 166MHz, and 512KB of level 2 cache. All built with 130nm technology. This is actually the same system powering the Boeing 787.

They always go with the old and proven.

And, in a higher radiation environment, more reliable.

The first and foremost reason I'm here is not something that Slackware could do, but contrary - couldn't.

Therefrom I assume most, if not all, Slackers around here came from the same if not like reason - something Slackware failed to do.

But I'm not thereby implying Slackware is lacking or should bring more to the table - no!

I only try to emphasize that Slackware is one of the (ever more scarce) OS out there that still supports the hope that more can be done, one has just to put more effort in.

This is a dying breed, but it is my breed and I'm staying to the end.

Had a string of plastic ones, all lost - but I still have my first Hemmi bamboo slde rule.

Yep

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I don't usually post on forums, though I lurk often. Usually when looking for an answer to a question I'm sure has been asked, that sort of thing. This thread caught my interest, though. I was surprised to see so many people coming to slackware so recently (better late than never), all with fairly interesting stories as to how.

I'll be the odd one here (I usually am, wherever I go) and say that I came to slackware almost 20 years ago, when a friend of mine told me that someone we worked with had a copy of Redhat linux and a cd burner. Both of us were using Windows, though we weren't fond of it. I found myself scratching my head when he produced a burnt cd of slackware 3.3. He assures me it's a linux distribution (I had no idea there were so many, with many more to come) and that we'll probably like it. It was a good long while before we even had X running, like months, partially because we were learning *nix and loving it. It didn't help that we were both command line kids. Another friend of ours that we worked with pointed out the XFree86Setup program, and we got busy killing everything graphical with xkill. It was a while before I would stop breaking sh!t just to fix it later. I can proudly say that I've never had to do the "reformat and reinstall" thing that those poor windows using bastards had to rely on. I bought (and still have on a shelf somewhere) Slackware 4.0 and 7.0 on cdrom, from one brick-and-mortar or another. The only real switch I made away from Slackware proper was to SLAMD64. I put off migrating to regular slackware 64 until I found out about alien BOB's multilib (thankyouthankyouthankyou for STEAM!), and am now running -current.

Ramblings aside, it's pretty cool to see young whipper-snappers in their 20's, along with old-school office ladies in their 70's, coming to the same conclusion that I have; that slackware is frickin' awesome.

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The truest hacker motto, ever.

seconded!

I just visited Slide Rule Museum. Some of these Hemmi Bamboo slide rules are impressive, some are beautiful, and some are impressive and beautiful at the same time.

Thanks for the link! I found a pic of my slide rule the box, and leather carrying case. The box says I paid $7.95 -- oh, around 1972-1973. The slide rule came with a user manual, complete with exercises and answers in the back. I still remember my chemistry/trig/senior math teacher. He used a metal circular model. He was so good with that thing that he would finish calculations before us kids finished reaching for our slide rules under the chair.

So are we old...?

Look, I'm 48. But I switched to Slackware for good about 2002 IIRC, and at that time I was still 32 years old and single. Not young, but not THAT old, either. So, I submit that many of us got acquainted with Slackware in a more or less young age.

Now we are writing in this thread, many of us being old geezers (at least compared to the usual "web developer" of a startup), but there's an insight that should be made. Many of us supposedly old geezers are long-time Slackware users. I switched to Slackware and used it continuously as my main driver for 17 years now. Others have done it so for as long or even longer.

In my case, it meant the following: that I grew increasingly impatient with the limitations and defects of other Linux distros and operating systems. Slackware offered, and still offers, way less aggravation than the others. That means peace of mind, and more time spent doing what we really want to do with our computer instead of working around the endless stupidity offered by other platforms.

In short: we are old because we are long-time users, and we are long-time users because we know what we are looking for in an operating sytem, been there, done that, and Slackware fit the bill just right.

P.S.: great answers by @astrogeek!

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If anything this is something that Patrick Volkerding should be honoured for. Computer rage is a real issue, and some or maybe even all of us have, at some point in our lives, experienced bouts of extreme anger at our machines. Some people get physically violent. This is very often down to problems with the operating system - with updates, with hangs, with crashes. Slackware makes using a computer a relaxing, trouble-free experience. I cannot use Ubuntu as I used to because of forced updates. I cannot use Debian as I used to because of systemd. Using Slackware is like being on computer-holiday: calming and stress-free. PV is a computarian, contributing to the well-being of computers, and their users, the world over.

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"Computer rage." Ha.

The first time I saw someone having computer rage, I was a tester at an accounting software firm. We testers had just gotten new desktops, running Windows 95 or 98 (each of us got to choose). Once the admin got mine set up, he left me to it.

So I rebooted it, using the Start menu. After the reboot, network card driver failed, blue screen.

It was his problem to fix. His circus, his monkeys. I wanted so much to point at him and laugh as he called down curses from heaven...