I remember some slander about vim from some detractor from way back in time where the argument was that vim is terribly slow when trying to insert a million characters into a line by going 1000000i followed by the character, followed by escape to run it.
Indeed, that is very slow, incredibly slow but vim is a text editor first and foremost, and not a text generator.

That said, a debunk existed even back then, where this particular request of a million 'a's or whatever could be generated with a specific write excommand vim has, forgot the details, though cause it was that specific of an attack against vim and very, well, in my opinion pointless.
(The write command generated the million characters in a fraction of a second, unlike the insert method which was paralyzed snail speedy)

I'll edit or add the information if I can find it, but, yeah, this applies to many things, but when it comes to passionate arguments/wars, its often good to try and check things twice.
My main beef with emacs is its chorded way of doing things, but it does it not well enough for me.
( I love plover, for example, an open source stenotyping engine. In fact, I like it so much that I'm saving up for a proper steno keyboard to use it. Chording done right, in that case)

That said, Slack offers both editors, and then some, another notch in the belt I wrote of earlier, the sheer amount of software a full install brings is just a smorgusboard of treats, and it all works out of the box, with only very little magic (as far as I know, most if not all administrative tools are actually shell scripts, and many things they do are simple things like symlinking files at specific places to swap out functionality, etc, and it works!).

Poettering, of course, is sadly in the distro now, which sucks, and I've fallen out of love with the church of the subgenius, too.
Still enjoy "Bob"s face, though, but I'm not even a Bobby at this point, but Slackware itself I still love the same as before.

Yes but the Gods use BitchX

2 members found this post helpful.

If you're talking about pulseaudio, he hasn't been involved in that project since 2012.

He brought that evil into the world, when Jack could have saved us all.
(It still could...)

I've been very vocal about despising Pulseaudio but I think "evil" is way over the top and inappropriate. Things aren't evil since they don't have choice. It's just anathema because it reduces options, which is ironic since that results in less choice for Users. To be clear my Main that has to perform DAW work is the only place where Pulseaudio gives me apoplexy, and primarily on 14.2. On other machines it isn't such a big deal. It's almost invisible or rather inaudible. Pulseaudio in effect poses a question - "At what price convenience?" and the answer is the cost is only in specific use cases, at least so far. While I, like you, vastly prefer Jack, Jack is not for the average PC user since it's power and configurability come at the cost of convenience. It doesn't currently "just work out of the box". Pulseaudio mostly does shich is why all the convenience distros use it... at the cost of options and power. That's not evil. That's just weak.

This, for me, too, but I realize that I'm an edge case, who does DAW-type things. (Hell, these days I only bother to compile a real time kernel for a laptop, where I might be driving a piece for a concert-type situation.) But even then on current, I didn't bother to go with the de-pulsed-version in /extra. It's enough that I can turn off pulse and go on with my business. You can't do that with other distros as easily as you can with slackware.

It may be worth a gentle nudge in the direction of reminding ourselves that this is a thread about celebrating Slackware's greatness, rather than the merits or demerits of Pulse Audio and 'evil' software. Because that conversation will very quickly deteriorate.

4 members found this post helpful.

Well-said, man! I am grateful for the tireless efforts of our maintainer and the Slackware Team of developers. I enjoy Slackware every day.

2 members found this post helpful.

True and I thought my post was also such a nudge since in this and other specific cases, Slackware provides demonstrably more choice than any distro I've ever tried which is dozens and less "evil", whatever else one calls it.

1 members found this post helpful.

Ah, you must not have experienced "flat volumes" with some beefy headphones.

Pulseaudio is the only general population software I know of that can physically hurt you, permanently.
You listen to something at 20% volume but because it tried to be "smart" it adjusted volumes based on newly spawned processes, or something like that.
So if something spawned that wants full volume, you get everyone on full volume, potentially giving you hearing damage, or hardware damage if you've got a beefy set of speakers.

That qualifies it as evil for me...lol

Edit: That'll be the last about pulseaudio from me, too. That flat volumes thing really was bad, though...real bad.

3 members found this post helpful.

That's just a corner case. Somebody losing his ears is not a bug.

I was hoping to find enthusiastic posts about how Slackware is great instead of I found small wave complains about pulseaudio. I say that "enjoying" is not a word that would match my own experience as Slackware user. I don't know. Do I enjoy using computer? Playing games give me some fun. But turning on Slackware box I am not singing "Alleluja", or "Sun is rising" But maybe I should.

1 members found this post helpful.

We already set "flat-volumes = no" in the daemon.conf with a hint on the rationale for that in the SlackBuild. It merely says to google for the reason why, but the spoiler is that it's for the same reason you gave (as well as it just being a poor default for many other reasons).

8 members found this post helpful.

Yeah. I thought that would've been done to death by now.

Well, here are some of the things that I've found I enjoy:

• tinkering and a little bit of optional DIY, unlike Arch which is more like adopting a pet.
  
• having command-line alternatives to software for a particular purpose for me to try out pre-installed on a distro for me to discover.
  
• not having to hunt down why startup or shutdown pauses (please let's not indulge in inits here).
  
• the idea of having a cohesive core system installed out-of-the-box with optional programs I might want to add on top of it, sort of like the FreeBSD approach - seems like this is a more sustainable path for maintaining a stable distribution.
  
• not needing to deal with youtube-dl's updater being disabled by Debian (rendering it useless) and having to download it myself and stick it in opt anyways (I suppose +1 for upstream closeness).
  
• not having important parts of my system get blown away because I don't need gedit anymore.
  
• not having gigabytes of weekly updates despite not even being on a rolling-release distro, like on Fedora, that break suspend support; it's like the worst of both worlds in that situation.
  
• tying into the cohesive base system - having necessary compile libraries included out-of-the-box, increasing the flexibility of the system if I want to add applications to it, that update close to upstream so I don't have to worry about dependency hell with backports (Debian) or third-party repos (openSUSE, Fedora, Arch).
  
• Slackbuilds and their simplicity inspires more confidence (rightfully or wrongfully) than Arch's much-touted AUR which has never failed to eventually bork my install.
  
• a plus feature of Slackpkg is it's clean-system feature which allows me to remove packages that I added from Slackbuilds that might, in the future, cause problems on the system; package managers of other distros seem to just integrate packages from third-party repos, for better or for worse.
  
• having Emacs installed out-of-the-box - feels like it helps give it the same level of legitimacy as Vim.
  
• due to the philosophy, I feel like I can trust the method behind the madness of where things are placed in the filesystem (compare this to how openSUSE and Fedora differ between each other from where they auto-mount devices, for example).
  
• I don't need a GUI to configure everything about the system (openSUSE).
  
• I get stability (we'll see, I suppose) without needing to accept two-year-old packages with ported patches that seem to duplicate upstream's work.
  

I move between distros every one or two years I think, so we'll see how long this lasts, but it's been working out. My only complaints might be the need for updates in the Slackbook (elilo and switching from vmlinuz-huge to vmlinuz-generic isn't mentioned, but is elsewhere), but maybe I'll be able to find away to submit my own updates.

P.S. to mods: if people start warring about inits or audio please just close the thread xD

3 members found this post helpful.

I really do like the kind of duality between super stable and rolling release. Stable has never failed me, and current only broke for me once, a few years ago, I forgot the details but it was something about a wget package breaking (can't remember if it was because of a missing lib, or what) and ruining the rest of the update for me, since I didn't have it on "download all packages first before installing them all one after another" but on "install every package as it comes in".

Aka "DOWNLOAD_ALL=on" in the config file, which I had on 'off'.
On is the default, but I can't remember if that was the case forever.

Anyway, Slackware has given me the least amount of trouble during updgrades, even substantial ones...it is possible to straight up upgrade from one stable to another without a reinstall.
A clean house is safer, but still, it just worked for me aside from that one time with wget.


Also:
One of the reasons people told me to try Slackware was because "you learn Linux with it", and it's true...with a twist.
I learned a lot at the start, but it generally behaved so well that I forgot some of the things I had to do at first because I was a noob.
Once I really got a grip on it, the fiddling stopped quite a bit...

P.S.:
Now that I think about that last point...
If I forgot a lot of the work on the "guts" and would have to look them up again...does that mean Slackware made me a noob againnnn?!
Probably not, it would come back quickly, but the thought amuses me...