My short story.

I have not watched a single episode of Game of Thorns. I'm in the 61-70 crowd. The computer I'm typing this on was bought in 2011. My first involvement in computers was in the 60's, wrote my first program on a remote teletype located in the back room of our physics lab connected to a mainframe. I've dealt with computers most of my life. During my working career I work maintained, repaired and operated a lot of specialized analog and digital computers. Didn't start with personal computers until around 1982 or so. These were work related, our office had a brand new Z-100 with a huge 10MB hard drive. I learned to code DBase II on that. My first personal computer was a NEC Powermate around 1988 or so. My first use of Slackware was shortly after it was introduced. Though the years I have tried many a distribution, always came back to Slackware. Guess it's been 15 years since I tried another distribution, just don't see the point.

Me too (for both statements).
I did read all of the "A Song of Ice and Fire" novels though (on which that TV series is based, its title even is the one of the FIRST novel) and am waiting for George Martin to finish the next one.
See also en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Song_of_Ice_and_Fire

I started with Mandrake-8.0. I purchased it in a box set at Wal-Mart for about $20. I had no idea what I was getting into. It actually became an obsession with getting things to work. The install went fine, but then I learned about winmodems. Then compiling a driver - which led to dependency hell, which led to going back to the install medium to add programs, which led again into dependency hell.....ad nauseum.

You should have seen my face when that winmodem finally fired up after getting and compiling the right driver. I used Mandrake through 9.2. I then installed Slackware 8.1 that I got a friend to download. I was still on dialup. Haven't looked back since. I have been running 64-current since it was introduced.

I'll be 65 in August. :)

Hmm... Thanks for this. I prefer a book over a TV series anyway. Never miss an episode. LOL I will be looking for this at our local book store.

Early computers, OS upgrade paths ..

My father was a microelectronics engineer, working at National Semiconductor, and he was quite determined that his son would also be a microelectronics engineer.

We did a few electronic projects together, but my heart didn't seem in it. In 1978 when his employer was getting rid of an old prototype computer (a PACE/Starplex monstrosity with 8" floppies and switches in the front panel so the user could toggle in the bootstrap instruction) he brought it home hoping it would catch my interest.

Oh boy did it ever catch my interest! Not like he hoped, though. I taught myself BASIC and PACE assembly language, and was totally in love with programming, not electronics.

A couple of years later he brought home an adm3a dumb terminal and a Hayes 1200 baud modem with which I could dial into "voder", the VAX-11/780 at the National Semiconductor office, and use his work account to read USENET. I also used it to dial up various BBS, in particular The Tavern.

A few years after that, in the early/mid 1980's he started collecting CP/M machines, based on the Z80 and Ferguson's BigBoard, on which I learned Pascal, Modula-2, Z80 Assembly, Prolog and C. I held onto my Z80 for years while my friends had 8088 IBM XTs. It still did everything I needed it to do, so I wasn't eager to upgrade (which is good, because my dad wasn't one to spend money on frivolities -- I don't think he spent more than $100 on any of these systems, and most of them he got for free).

Eventually I did get myself a used 12MHz i286, with 512KB of RAM, which was a huge step up from 64K. It ran MS-DOS, which was like CP/M on steroids. I used it to write text files (schoolwork, mostly) and write programs in Turbo Pascal, Turbo C and Turbo Assembler. It died eventually and I got a 16MHz i286 to replace it, with 2MB of RAM.

In 1992, my friend Ian showed me this new thing called Linux. I didn't really get the appeal, but he was clearly excited about it. It needed an i386, and wouldn't run on my humble i286, but he pressed a floppy into my hand anyway which would boot Linux 0.96 (which went into a drawer and was forgotten).

That computer saw me all the way through high school and two years of junior college. In 1992 I left home to go to University, and my parents gifted me with my first new computer ever, an i486-DX50 with 16MB of RAM and VESA Local Bus. I was so proud of that thing, which was fairly powerful for the time. It saw me through college, during which time I upgraded from MS-DOS to OS/2 2.1.

In 1996, my senior year, I got frustrated that OS/2 didn't have support for BSD network sockets, which meant I could only develop with sockets on the University's crappy old shared Sun, which was chronically overloaded and subject to harsh data quotas. It would have been much more convenient if I could develop such software on my own computer.

I could have spent a large sum of money on a commercial library product which would give OS/2 support for BSD sockets, but I was a starving student so that didn't appeal to me much. Or I could try this "Linux" thing my friend Ian had shown me a few years earlier.

So I got a copy of the book "Linux Unleashed", which had a Slackware 3.0 CD in the back cover, and thus began a beautiful relationship which persists to this very day.

If this pole shows the correct result, then Slackware is clearly for old people. That's depressing. Oh btw, i also had to vote 41-50

Again, only when the poll is a bit representative:
Then the disturbing fact is that there were only 2 votes for <20. That is a real shame. It's also bad for contribution to this distro, whether it be on forums, howtos, exposure on youtube, packages, money, etc, etc. Hardly any new influx means a slow decay in that aspect. One can wave it all away as if it weren't a popularity contest, and pretend it doesn't matter, but it does affect stuff.

The main reason is probably package management combined with the fact that in current times there is more new software available at a faster pace, and people want to be able to try that out quickly, without the pain of searching and compiling dependencies every time. Which is understandable. In the older days you kept certain applications for years because there was less choice, and then you did not have to worry about compiling complex stuff too much. Slackbuilds help a lot, but in debian based distros, applications are just an apt install away, and it's on there. Also there is often vendor support from certain companies to provide a debian repository for their software. And that's more an advantage now, then it used to be. The slow release cycle and no major recent(!) desktop environment don't do this distro any good either.

Personally I still use salix, because I really like slackware. But professionally I simply can't afford to use it anymore, because it's simply too time consuming to get certain software to work at a decent time-frame. Especially with the reasons mentioned above.

It's a shame that Salix is not more popular. It's basically just slackware with a very nice repository and very easy and quick to install. It's just slackware done right for the desktop/laptop user But it has hardly any coolness factor. It also lacks that finishing touch (logical short-keys for tiling, integration of certain features of application into the interface, etc etc) and the themeing is quite bland, well, not quite, but very bland.

To improve the above, some change is really needed. But I don't know if it is wanted or even feasible. Guy's like Eric Hameleers do incredible work, but he's only human, and the day has only 24h for him as well.

You may want to take a look at aliasless's post from page 2 - he's one of those <20's and goes into some theory as to why younger people don't use Slackware:

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ml#post5990710

The bottom line is that it's just not as cool as other distros. If you hang out on 4chan's /g/ board, you'll get a good idea of what a lot of the younger generation use - it normally comes down to three which are Debian, Arch and Gentoo. Slackware is just seen as being too 'old' in its ethic [which is part of the reason it exists, and also, I'm sure it doesn't care].

Having said that, the poll shows enough users in their 20s/30s for there not to be much concern, as far as I can see. The under 20s will graduate to Slackware when they realise trading coolness for stability and user control is a good exchange.

Slackware is eccentric, perhaps the most eccentric of all the top distros. It always has been. But that's probably because it's still mainly run by its Benevolent Dictator for Life, Patrick Volkerding. It's a community effort but it's also one man's dream.

Since people tend to become more eccentric in old age, it's not surprising that oldies are attracted to Slackware. But it's not a popularity contest. It's a matter of taste which distro you end up with.

57 here. First installed Slack in the early 90s when it was a new thing. Don't even recall that machine now.

Yes! It has a core ethic, a problem for a generation raised up without the concept. Fear for them.

Yes again! Difficult idea to grasp from within a noisy herd.

Democracy, feed lots, google and lynch mobs all operate on the same principle: "head count" is all that matters.

But there is a better, quieter path which only exists away from the mob... let's hope they don't find it.

Majority seems to fall within 30-70 age - people who one can't lie to any more, right?

I'm 24, and started using Slackware with version 12.2. I have found it to be the simplest GNU/Linux distro to use. Config files and such are exactly where you'd expect them to be. Things just really make sense. I also like the philosophy, and the stringent development process resulting in an incredibly stable system.

Thanks Pat and the team for everything you guys do!

The 1983 movie "WarGames" showed up on Amazon Prime today. Now there is some old computer gear!
:)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames

And I still remember what "WOPR" stood for.

I remember watching the movie in, gasp, the theater. When the general said he would p-ss on a spark plug if he knew that would help, every male in the theater winced and groaned. The women pretended the men were not wincing and groaning. :D