my name is also @vino29. i have added you Lysander666.

i have not been that active there as i am a creature of habit and have a favourite local. i will be travelling end of the week so hopefully will be able to add more beers and location soon!

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Celebrating tonight: after a very good tutorial with one of my supervisors, my dept are OK with my adding some computer science elements to my music PhD. That's worth a drink [Guinness, because it's one of Patrick's favourites as well].

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Indeed, and the Foreign Extra is my favorite of all. Cheers!

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Well, I'm off to Turkey for just over a week tomorrow and I have some excellent 6.8% IPA tonight to get me in the mood. It's from a London craft brewery called The Kernel [they're just round the corner from me and make excellent strong-flavoured beer, no, not Turkish beer but there'll be enough of that there].

I'll be taking my netbook along which runs Slackware 14.2. Will check in now and again - have a great week, all.

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I believe I first used Slackware in roughly 2000 with version 7.0 or thereabouts. I remember installing from a stack of floppies. I've been back and forth across many distributions since then, chasing fads and clever package managers, but I always seem to end up back with Slackware. It's sensible, functional, and (by my way of reckoning things) simple. The thing I like best about Slackware is how much it respects its users. It credits our intelligence, doesn't go behind our backs, doesn't shield us from details we're not expected to understand, and doesn't cram overmarketed, underperforming, hyped-up, bloated, anti-Unix trends down our throats. In a world where "modern" distributions are expected to hide the boot messages behind fact-free boot-time graphical throbbers, Slackware still defaults to runlevel 3, and it uses a real init to do so.

Also, Slackware still ships with xv. :^)

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Well, I suppose this is an appropriate juncture for me to raise a glass to Patrick. I know we have a thread for the quarter-century, but this one is for beer [mostly] - and I raise this pint of the awesomely-named Cosmic Warrior IPA to you, Patrick, what a cool name for the quarter.

Have a great evening, all. No beer photos tonight, I'm in the pub, but we're all OK with just text, aren't we [it's Slackware, after all]?

Drinking this to celebrate going full Slack on all machines. I've been with Slack since Jan on my netbook, it made it to my laptop as well and it's now been on my desktop for nearly a month. Cheers, all, and have a good weekend.

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Cheers and congratulations!

PS: keep that Debian CD, they make great coasters [/insert drum roll here]

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I've made it a full month running Slack as my daily driver.. not missing Windows!

Time for some Crown Royal Whisky.

Cheers to Pat and friends for this wonderful distro!

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Good for you. I added to your rep with that post because it is a big deal to take that step. It gets better as time marches on

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Excellent, well done. A mammoth leap from Windows.

I'm on this tonight - and since I upgraded to 4.4.153 today the name of the brewery couldn't be more appropriate. Anyone who's a beer lover [and esp IPA] must try their stuff if they can get hold of it, it's astonishingly good. And they're just down the road from me.

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Congrats, its a bit early here for Whiskey, so I will tip my cup of Earl Grey to you.

PS: Ah hell, you look like you have a wee bit extra in that bottle...

Well.. I did.

Why didn't I start using Slackware, yet? Well, "yet" was a long time ago for me.

My first experience with Slackware was back in 1994/5. I installed one of the Slackware 2.x releases (pre ELF) on a 386DX-33MHz with 8MB ram and an old Quantum 80MB hard drive. I also dual booted Windows 3.1 on a then-new Western Digital 1.2GB drive. Slackware already ran very well then. I had a minimal install on the 80MB hard drive, but was able to install and run X with FVWM window manager (still in Slackware). Early versions of Mosaic and Netscape web browsers worked. This first installation let me learn a lot about UNIX, but I still primarily ran MSDOS/Windows 3.1. It was impressive and stable, so I kept booting it to play around. The idea that multiple users could remotely login was interesting, but I never made much use of it. I thought it could be interesting for some kind of modem-dialup BBS, but then the internet took over.

A little later, I installed Slackware96 on the same computer, but on the WD 1.2GB drive, and dual booted Windows95 on a newer WD 6.4GB disk. I could see Slackware improving, and it was rock solid stable already. But, it did not yet have many applications or games. So, I still mainly ran MSDOS games (Wolf3D, DooM, etc.) and Windows for some productivity apps.

Some time passed until I built a new computer in 1998, a Celeron 300A on Asus P2B motherboard and with the new Nvidia TNT graphics card with hardware OpenGL. This computer was a huge improvement over the 386DX-33. OpenGL versions of DooM and Quake ran very fast, and a preview release of Quake III Arena also ran fairly well. Windows 98 ran on a new WD 20GB drive, and the old 6.4GB was available to dual boot Slackware. I must have been following Slackware-current back then, because KDE got added to Slackware on Nov 29, 1998 during development of Slackware 3.9.0, which was released on Jul 16, 1999, and I'm pretty sure I was using KDE in late 1998 already. Nvidia provided X window system drivers for the TNT graphics card already back then, and games were very quickly showing up on linux. It was not long until I was playing DooM, Quake, and other games in Slackware on the TNT with full hardware OpenGL acceleration. Sound card was a Creative Labs AWE32 from the old computer, but later replaced it with an AWE64. With KDE and OpenGL games on Slackware, linux was looking very very good then. It was at that time, in 1999, that Slackware 3.9.0 was ready to take over my computer 100% and I could just completely uninstall MSDOS/Windows. By late 1999, that is what I did and I have been running 100% Slackware ever since.

In 2000, I built another new computer, a Pentium III 800MHz on Asus P3V4X with 1GB of ECC ram, a 3ware Escalade 6410 RAID1 disk controller, and Nvidia GeForce 256 DDR (later, upgraded to GeForce 5200 cards). This computer ran Slackware for 10 years 24/7 and never failed or lost my data. It was retired, still working fine, when I built a new computer in 2010.

In 2010, I built a computer with Xeon X3450 processor on Asus P7F-E server/workstation board, with 8GB ECC RDIMM, and Gigabyte GeForce GT240 graphics (always using the nvidia binary blob driver). Sound card is the Asus ALC888 MIO audio card using S/P-DIFF output and HDMI audio to a TV/monitor (switchable via PulseAudio Volume Control). This computer has the Asus PIKE1068E RAID addon card and used its RAID1 feature for about a year. Then, the PIKE1068E was flashed to have an "IT" BIOS without RAID features, and I configured an MD raid6 with 8x 1TB disks, using GPT + mdRAID6 + LUKS + LVM + ext4 stack (well supported by slackware's initrd/lilo). This has been running Slackware64 + multilib (stable releases) for 8 years 24/7. Asus sells a similar motherboard now, the P10S-E/4L. With all the CPU bugs (meltdown/spectre), I guess there will be new hardware later that is similar, but fixed. A computer like this is not too expensive. With newer, larger size, hard drives, probably just 4 big drives are enough now in RAID6 for data protection (some users might choose RAID10).

Anyhow, I can attest to 18 years of running Slackware 24/7 on nvidia proprietary drivers, with ECC ram (a kind of server/workstation configuration), and that Slackware is a very stable and reliable OS for long term usage. It can run games and productivity applications, and I have never needed to dual boot Windows. I've always been able to find a linux application for whatever I need. Unless you require Windows software or games that only run on Windows, you can run Slackware and have a very reliable computing experience if you build your computer using server-grade parts like ECC ram and Xeon processor, because that is the kind of hardware that is best supported by linux. That is my advice and experience for those that are curious about it and about how I decided to start using Slackware with no regrets.

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And now, you can also run Windows games (directx11) using wine-staging and dxvk. For that, I raise a DIPA from Ryentorps, cheers Slackware!

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