Really pleased you've posted, I was wondering who the sub-20 was. Why would you say a lot of people in their teens/early 20s move to Debian and Arch, or prefer such distros over Slackware? And what do you personally like about Slackware?

This is a great post aliasless. Really interested in your responses. Please let us know what drew you here with all the other options out there.

It varies by context, but I think for the most part, it's a mixture of not being immediately appealing (compared to Debian or Fedora, for example) and not being "cool" enough (compared to ex. Arch and Gentoo)

For the first case, it's difficult to see why you should use Slackware over another distro. Most people who've heard of Slackware, but haven't used it, think it's old and archaic, and more modern distros do things better. Admittedly, the reason I had originally tried out Slackware was because it had seemed archaic to me, but I've found that's not really the case.

For the second, an unfortunate amount of users in my age group think they're better than someone else because they use Linux. They think that using Arch, Gentoo, or some other 'difficult' distribution will make them seem cooler than anyone else, even if the value as a distribution is overhyped.

Personally, I love how solid Slackware is, how everything works exactly like I would expect, and how easy it is to modify parts of the system. There are few distributions that fulfill all three of these, the closest I can think of is CRUX, but it is crippled by its extreme minimalism.

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So what we're seeing here is the difference between how a distribution works and how a distribution appears. There's no doubt that Debian, Arch and Gentoo are the 'coolest' distros [Fedora lost out], though Gentoo has something of an almost overly-geeky tinge, as far as I can ascertain. One would presume that as long as projection is a concern among zoomers/generation Y [which it will always be], distros like the aforementioned will win out.

Nevertheless, as you've seen, if one really cares about one's distro - its stability, how it teaches one about *nix, its user-control - Slackware is an excellent choice. I also can't believe that community is that much of a concern for some of these people because the communities are very hit and miss. The Debian forum is now absolute shite, the Gentoo forum is OK while the Arch forum is slightly better. If people care more about how they appear and e.g. posting screenshots around the internet, what you're saying makes even more sense [not that I'm decrying posting screenshots around the internet, I'm just saying that that's not all it should be about].

I also think the earlier point made about systemd is important - it's more the older generations of *nix users who can't stand it, and as it progressively oozes into more distros it forces autorelevance to the point where many younger people don't see why it should be disliked or know any different.

I'm 48 now, hopefully turning 49 in September.

I began using Linux in May 2000, in a brand-new Pentium II with a whooping 64 MB RAM. Great machine for the time. I ordered and installed Red Hat Linux 6.2 Deluxe Edition. It simply blew my mind. I was 29 at the time.

My beginnings in computing date from way earlier. I began using a Timex-Sinclair 1000 (ugh), then transitioned to a C-64 (way better). I also got some time playing with a IBM 4331 mainframe using 3270 terminals (cool!), as well as CP/M systems, MS-DOS, and Atari ST boxes.

My exposure with Slackware began with Slackware 8.0, some little time later than my first Linux install, but I couldn't use it because I could not get it to recognize any network interface (neither eth0 nor wlan0). But I liked its simplicity, robustness and speed. Later, with Slackware 9.0, I was able to use it thanks to hotplug (network connectivity automagically detected) and then I never looked back. That was about 2002--2003 I guess.

I used stable releases up to 13.37, and then I began using -current. It's amazing how updated -current is, and yet it's far more stable than most distros' stable releases.

When I tell others that I'm a Slackware user (that's when someone else asks me, I don't go around bragging it) I automatically get the utmost respect and guru status. That's funny because I see Slackware as solid, stable... and simple, low-maintenance and with sane defaults. It's really something like UNIX nirvana .

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When asked my age I always reply, one hundred and five.

I'm bored, don't like "retirement" and have been looking for a position, a real job, but not having much luck.
They, prospective employers, cannot legally ask your age (at least not in the U.S.) so to get around the
law, the third or four question on the application is, "What year did you graduate from college?"
That's the end of that. Either I don't hear from them or they reply with, "While your qualifications are, indeed, impressive....... yada, yada, yada......"
For a while I took a job with a major package carrier doing grunt work, but I'm getting too old for physical labor and, two, some of those people!!!???? It would appear that all we have done over the last thirty years or so is drag the entire society down to the lowest common denominator.
Very sad.

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I empathize! Being a Grumpy Old Man means the hair in my ears and nose grow faster than the hair on my head. Being a Grumpy Old Man, I want very much to move away from long, cold, dark, winters to some place really hot and dry. Yet at my age I realize that one look at my white facial hair during an interview would "disqualify" me. I am resigned that I might have to remain where I am until I can officially retire and become a state-sponsored parasite. The good news is in the current job I get to play with Linux all day (albeit not Slackware).

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I'm mid 30's. I'm using computers since 286 but my first PC was a pentium 133mhz, with 8mb ram and a hd of 1.28gb. Video card was an trident tgui 9440 with 1mb (later on I upgraded to 2mb). One year later I bought 32 mb ram.

My second pc was a k6-2 400mhz with 64mb ram and hd of 4gb. Onboard video, I guess it was SiS 6xxx with 8mb.

After that I got an athlon xp 2000+, 256mb ram (later on I bought 512mb and after some time changed 256+512 for 2gb). Video card was a geforce4 mx 440se with 64mb - agp8x. Good times

In this athlon xp I learned linux. Slackware 8 or 9 (can't remember which one I got).

I've used this a-xp until 2010 when I bought a laptop, core 2 duo with 4gb ram. Had to install linux mint (lmde-1).
In 2013 I bought a new laptop, core i3 (3rd gen) - also linux mint (lmde-3 right now).

And in 2015 a desktop, core i7 4790, 16gb ram, 1tb hd, radeon r7 250. Lmde-3 on it.

I hope to switch to slackware again soon, but need time to re-install everything.

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Nostalgia... karlmag mentioned the Amstrad CPC6128, my first pooter was the Amstrad PCW8256 (CP/M OS and unique 3" floppy disks). Soon replaced by a desktop running MS-DOS and after that a Toshiba T1200 - wrote my PhD thesis on that one back in 1998. Then a Dell Inspiron 1100 (WinXP).
My first contact with Linux was an Asus eee900 that came with some weird Debian variety. I soon started to look for alternatives, and even if there were a number of ubuntu variants adapted for the eee, I settled for the slackware-based distro FluxFlux, maintained by two German guys, Manfred Müller and Thomas Schönhütl. It was a great distro, but sadly the maintainers had to give it up for personal reasons - last stable version was built on Slackware 13.1. After that I switched to the also slackware-based AbsoluteLinux, lightweight enough to work on the Inspiron with only 8MB dedicated video memory -AL was the only distro I found that didn't freeze during boot.
In 2016 I finally decided to go 64 bit, got myself a Lenovo Ideapad, and decided that install from one of Eric's liveslak isos was the easiest way to setup a multilib system.
After over 10 years I still see myself as a Linux noob. I'm neither a mathematician nor a linguist, sadly, and have never grasped the grammar of script writing. Thanks to Pat's and Eric's upgrades and the sterling work done by the SBo maintainers, I've nevertheless managed to keep my system stable over the years and have never really felt the temptation to try out anything else.

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That last sentence intrigues me. I wonder if people attracted to free/libre software -- somehow -- intuitively understand there are more options for computer OSs than Henry Ford's "black." Often I am dumbstruck that so many computer users have no concept of anything other than what came preinstalled on their computer or that they have choices. I am not denigrating those users because there are many topics of which I am fully ignorant. Yet these same users seem to know they have many choices for automobiles, kitchen appliances, phones, etc. Just observing.

I know what you mean about the hair. I bought rechargeable batteries for my rotary trimmer.

A couple of friends have retired to Southeast Asia. It is hot, but with that humidity, not very dry.
Nine months out of the year it is miserable, IMHO, but maybe one gets use to it. Yet, if I didn't have
family here, I might have made the move. Prices are going up, but I still could live better for less down there.
OTOH, I don't know if I would want to be that far away from home if something were to go wrong and as an expat you have no rights of any kind in the host country. As I think it through, an occasional trip, round-trip, is probably the best option.


I heard a good one yesterday. "I'm not saying I am old and worn out, but I don't go anywhere near the curb on Trash Day."

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These poll results are a little surprising.

Give me a year for over.

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29 here.

it's a little hard for me to nail down exactly when I first used Linux.. but it could not have been earlier than 2003 or later than 2007, as it was the latest version of Fedora Core at the time.

I remember talking to somebody in an irc channel when I was having some problems with Fedora Core.. they mentioned if I wanted more control over how the system is installed and configured I should try Slackware.

So I did. On a Pentium II Slotted CPU at 300mhz, 64 (Maybe 128?) megs of ram. It was pretty painfully slow to compile data and I spent what felt like a lifetime going through the packages one by one during install.

I remember finishing the install and asking "Now what?" Someone asked me "What do you want to do?" and I replied along the lines of "I want to get to the desktop." that's where I learned startx.

It was a lot of fun, and playing Doom on Linux for the first time was a really magical experience.. but for some reason I didn't stick with it, some audio issue I couldn't figure out how to resolve pushed me back to Windows. There was likely a solution at the time but my teenage mind wasn't too interested I guess. I was always getting irritated at "Why don't things just work??" "Linux is never going to be worth using when Windows just works!!"

You know, the kind of garbage people continue to complain about now as if the people maintaining an OS on their own time owe them something.

I only used Linux a little here and there over the years, I had a stint with Linux Mint that lasted the better part of a summer sometime earlier this decade.. but in recent years I was getting sick of Windows.. really sick of it. And in August of '18 when Valve announced steam play I said to hell with it, lets try Linux again.

Slackware was my first pick since I knew it as a good distro with a nice community.. I had issues during install but this time I persisted. Nearly a decade of working in IT professionally I think has made me more patient and willing to actually research problems instead of giving up.

At this point I'm now mostly comfortable. I know how to update and maintain slackware, how to use slack builds, how to compile source code and get the binaries setup as a slackware compatible package so it shows up properly in /var/log/packages and can be easily removed if needed..

In a way this kind of put me on my career path.. I recently accepted a new job that is said to eventually require me to learn how to support their infrastructure of Linux machines, when the interviewer asked me what I wanted to do eventually I said "Server administration.. Linux.." he got excited and said "Oh? It's SO HARD to find anybody even willing to learn it!"

I'm sure I'll have to learn Red Hat and systemd or something and all that entails but that's okay, Slackware if nothing else made me comfortable with heavily using a terminal... not afraid to learn new commands and read documentation.

Can confirm; when I was in your age group people around me thought the same way.. Gentoo was the one I always heard people bragging about using.

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52 here. I changed decades between this thread and this one https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...re-4175473149/