Here's another who has been searching for just over two and a half years in order to find that promised land of being satisfied with the arrangement of installations.

As a Linux Newbie in October '16, my first project was getting Slackware 14.2 installed as I wanted it with KDE4 and such applications as I needed for my other personal projects.

Once that was done after about a year, a fair bit of distro-hopping ensued to satisfy my need to learn about Linux and to find an installation combo that worked for me.

Next step was hooking it all together so that each distro could see and, when needed, communicate with the other using shared data repositories.

Once this was all completed it became time to just enjoy the fruits of my labour.

Once we have everything we need, it does become time to just stop and leave our Installations in peace.

Here there be Slackware 14.2, Debian 8.10 and Kubuntu 18.04 and they each do what's required of them.

So I quite understand the need to say "Enough Already". I'm too old to run with the latest thing wolf-pack like I did 30 years ago, so I have settled at last. Slackware 15 has a partition ready for when 15 arrives but I can wait now.

There are other projects I want to do but they will get done when I'm ready.

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Never were there wiser words spoken. I have done exactly that, and have indeed enjoyed everything I have accomplished "that just works".

Just my

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I'm also old; I'll be 62 in August.
I've used Linux since 2002, and Slackware since 2004. I love Slackware a lot. Debian 10 will be released on July 6th, in one week. I may give that a go on one of my 5 Slackware64-current machines, or in a VM. Curiosity keeps me young. I love free open source software!

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I will prolly have a look at it too. When there are 2 300GB Sata disks begging to be used, it'd be rude not to try it!!

I'm not far behind at 56, so I fully agree with the need to faff around all the time.

Keeps us less old.....

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I have Debian Testing installed, which already identifies itself as Debian 10 (“buster”). So, in a way, I’m already giving it a go.
Though, to be honest, I haven’t used it much lately. I’m mostly running Slackware on this laptop.

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Agreed in entirety.

Slackware users have it pretty good. Last Friday, a Fedora-using friend had a conniption on chat, which is relevant:

I was surprised and saddened, because Fedora used to be one of the better-tested distributions.

You would think he would be very happy with Slackware, because things JFW, but I've suggested it to him in the past and he discarded the notion out of hand. Said something snide about software from the 1990's.

I guess he'd rather have a super-modern desktop which literally drives him to despair.

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You should recommend Windows to him!

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Give me "software from the 1990s" which works over a super-modern desktop any day of the week, thank you very much!

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I can certainly understand getting off the software upgrade treadmill. I recently spend two days rebuilding, upgrading, adding, removing 119 perl module packages because I was getting the infamous "loadable library and perl binaries are mismatched". I couldn't work it down to the offending packages so I just wipe perl and reinstalled. The satisfaction comes at the end. Missed a few Slackware64-current updates while working this, all caught up now.

Always look forward to elusive kernel updates. I jump with joy when I see a boost or icu4c bump in ChangeLog.txt as eggciting times are ahead.

I remember when I was 62... I was still too afraid of Slackware to try it out.

Keeps me playing with computers

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Here's my take on things. I'm a relative newcomer compared to some of the Slackers here on LQ; I've used Slackware for 15 years. As a Slacker I suffer from what I like to call the Tyranny of Perfection. That is, when I get my Slackware systems set-up they_just_work. Always. At the moment I'm running 5 Slackware64-current desktops and laptops. They all work flawlessly(there is very rare breakage in -current which is usually fixed in days).
So all of my computers work, and they continue to work without hiccups. It's maddening I tell you, maddening!
So then on occasion I will look around the vast open source ecosystem and see if I can find something better. Recently I've farted around with Arch on a bare metal install and also on VMs. I'll probably try out Debian 10 on Saturday. Invariably I find an annoyance with other operating systems. So I come home to Slackware after a brief affair. Acceptance. Slackware just works, man.

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I am beginning to see Slackware people like latter-day JFK-types.

"We don't choose Slackware because it is easy, but because it is hard."

Just a random thought to coincide with the 50 year anniversary of Apollo 11.



Edit:

To respond to TTTK, my posting was only due to having watched a programme on Channel 4 (UK) on the 1969 Moon Launch of Apollo 11. I'm not drunk but just in the mood for a bit of a trip down memory lane.

You are absolutely right about the GUI prevalence today. I started with Z80 Assembly on the ZX Spectrum in 1982 and a year of SysAdmin of Xenix 386 in '91, Over the decades things have got more Holdy-handy but Text stuff is a bit harder for those of us having spent decades in a GUI environment because it's necessary for us to mentally step back in time.

TBH, it was just an excuse to mention 1969.

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It might be more accurate to say that GUI-laden distributions make a few common tasks extremely easy, but everything else hard, sometimes prohibitively so.

Slackware's structural simplicity makes everything fairly easy, but not as easy as those other distributions' specifically-targeted use-cases.

"Easy" here is also relative to the user's comfort level with such things as configuration via text files. To those of us who have been using computers for a while, working with text files is familiar enough to be easier than using a GUI. To users who think of GUIs as the normal case, there's an additional psychological hurdle.

We are as shaped by our tools as our tools are shaped by us.

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Vi!

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100% agreed. As surprising as it can seem, using Slint in console mode is frightening even for blind users coming from Ubuntu, although from an ergonomic stand point you'd think that a graphical environment is a lot more difficult to use if you can only read the screen using a screen reader like Orca (or NVDA for Windows) as you then need to learn the hierarchy of objects, while there's a lot less commands to learn to just review the screen with a console screen reader like espeakup or fenrir.

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