Not really a question but more a personal observation/story/experience of the last 2 months. (perhaps interesting or not)

I have been on Slackware for almost 2 decades, On and off. Some years I ran Slackware as the only distro. Some years I mixed it up. with puppy linux and windows and openBSD. The last years I only really ran slackware/salix, except for a short amount of time were I had to run Windows to follow an education. Recently I upgraded both my laptop and PC to Slackware Current. Everything that is installed just works flawless. Good performance, my old scripts which uses oldskool tools, recent virtualbox with bridge networking, steam games, you name it, there are no surprises.

Sometimes I dislike Slackware when I want to install certain 3rd party software, and it takes me gazillion amount of time to figure stuff out, and sometimes I fail with that. So for my PC, which I also use for gaming and multimedia , I tried to replace it with Mint, Ubuntu and also debian. Why those? For the obvious reasons, nl., Want to install some piece of software? .. just one "apt install" away. Lot's of support for 3rd party stuff, which just means you add a repo, and again, ...just one "apt install" away. So, basically to take the easy route, and have more comfort.

I think I gave them a fair chance, since I ran each of them for a couple of weeks as the only system on that PC. All use systemD, which from a usability point of view I kinda like. It gives you easy tools for managing services and getting the right info out of your log files, without the need of being an ace in bash scripting. But it comes with complexity under the hood, and obviously it does not really fit in well with the KISS principle and the idea that one can easily replace a certain system if a better system appears.

Each time during those trials I hit a wall. Things that are relatively easy on Slackware, are difficult on mint , ubuntu or debian. Especially related to the init, or easy editing scripts. Or just fixing a little problem under the hood. Those things often require more wading through documentation/forums on the other the distro's. Also, mostly they are performing a tad slower then Slackware. The difference in performance is not huge, but it is noticeable. Especially with a lot of multitasking. I don't really know what the cause of that is.

Anyway, every time after a few weeks of trying, I went back to Slack. One thing improved a lot during those attempts to get rid of Slackware on that PC: My backup scripts and the structure of my home data improved a lot. My laptop and PC are now fully synced within seconds (depending on the number of changes), because I finally created proper backup scripts.

Seems that getting rid of it is kinda hard. Perhaps I better stick to virtualization on Slackware when I feel the need to go for other endeavors.


edit: I kinda regret this post, since it doesn't really not belong in a forum. But I already posted it. It was also kinda meant as a compliment to the Slackware system.

Anyway, I found a nice solution, for the above, nl using more virtualization. I already knew seamless mode in Virtualbox ( running one or more applications from a guest as if it ran directly on the host), but I hardly ever used it. Normally I only used virtualbox for just running a different distro or windows for testing some stuff, and after that I just deleted the guests. This time I've setup a small ubuntu and windows guest for the keep, both with shared folders with the Slackware host. And virtualbox seamless mode works really well for those applications that are difficult to get on slackware. So whenever I need one of those applications, I fire up a virtual machine, and use seamless mode.

Jumping to a Debian-based distro after two decades of Slackware is going to be hard. In some sense, Debian is the opposite pole of Slackware in the Linux world, especially for an experienced power user.

Newbies / inexperienced users who rarely venture into the command line or look under the hood would normally only register differences in how desktop environments are configured. Those differences are very superfluous, and can be easily overcome. XFCE is still XFCE both on Debian and Slackware. The differences at the core are much bigger. Prepare for the culture shock.

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Yep, in my experience the big distro' are perfect so long as you like them "as shipped". As soon as you start wanting to change something that doesn't quite suit you then all that extra ease-of-use engineering that went into them seems to get in the way more often than not.

My preference is for a simple/malleable distro' that I can easily bend to my will, but like you I'm old-school and I am quite prepared to write my own scripts/programs/patches to achieve that. Not everyone has the time, inclination or knowledge to do that.

I'm currently using CRUX linux as my daily drive, however, I'm still tracking the progress of Slackware-current and this community here. After 25 years, it's hard to let-go completely.

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yeah it's probably true. If you are used to something, and you try something else, you lose the familiarity. Two things that were most annoying while trying those debian based distro's, and the reason to just stick to Slackware, were the lacking simplicity with many little things, and those little performance differences. So when running for example Mint, I just always had that negative feeling that told me " if I just ran Slackware, my pc would run better". I don't have a history of autism, but this worried me a bit I do however care about performance of a computer so much, that I always fine-tune everything to be as performant as possible. So I value performance more then some comfort or visual fluff, within a certain extent.

Edit: oh, btw, my starting post was meant serious, as in I really tried to replace Slackware on that PC. But actually it was also meant as an attempt to compliment the creator and those who assist to make Slackware happen, in a humorous way. Because it's that good that I can't even get rid of it.

The simplicity / lack thereof is in the eye of beholder.

I'm a happy Debian user. That means that I value uniformity, homogeneity, and predictability over originality, authenticity, and pristiness.

Slackware tries to be as non-invasive as possible, while Debian heavily patches upstream software in order for it to fall in line with the Holy Debian Policy.

The Debian way: all software MUST conform to the Holy Debian Policy, upstream authors and their wishes be damned.

Upside: uniform package naming rules, uniform locations for config files etc. across the whole distribution.

Downside: the upstream documentation (e.g. their Wiki) often is not applicable anymore (e.g. the config files may be located elsewhere and named differently than what was intended by upstream authors.). More patching also means more opportunities for introducing new bugs. Remember the Debian Random Number Bug.

Fedora/RHEL/CentOS are the worst. Slackware and Debian may be on the opposite sides philosophically, but at least, they're consistent in their approaches.

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I have only been using Slackware since 2014 so am sort of a newbie as it goes. Slackware64 -current is my daily driver and it does 98% of what i need to do. I have a video camera that uses a windows-based driver. I have tried gphoto2 and other linux tools for the camera. I have used Ubuntu and Mint and Kali and Arch and POP!Linux and Kubuntu. I learned some things about KDE and appreciated AlienBob even more after trying Kubuntu. POP!Linux has a close link with NVIDIA and I learned something about NVIDIA from POP! but POP! is very weak as compared with Slackware. I couldnt stand Mint at all, and I dont know why anyone likes it, wow... I got along ok with Ubuntu and it has a decent implementation of adb-tools for my android cell phone but not much else to offer me but hassle. Arch also wasnt worth the trouble but I installed it once to prove something that I have forgotten. The excitement of KALI was not. I have a dictation software that needs Windows. So, if the camera and the dictation software ran in Linux I would never see windows. I do keep 2 installs of Slackware on my machine on different partitions so that in case I bork the main one I can start the other and go in the back door and fix it. That is a bacon-saving strategy.

If Slackware disappeared, I honestly have no idea what I would use. I started on Debian in 2000, had a dalliance with LFS, and then settled on Slackware around 2005. I've had to support Red Hat and Ubuntu, and Fedora (what Red Hat became for non-commercial users) isn't bad of that category. I tried Arch for 6 months and ran screaming back to Slackware. (This was before UEFI was well-supported.) There just isn't another distro that lets you do whatever you want without a big fight, like Slackware does. (I've heard good about Endeavour and SuSE, but I've never used either.)

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I've had pretty good luck with Debian too, as far as the Big Name distros go. It's more friendly to tweaking and running stripped down than Fedora for example. Accustomed to slackware current though, I don't love Debian's glacial update process. ALl the software is a million years old. Flatpaks help, but they don't solve everything.

"Familiarity breeds contempt" is the old saying and everybody suffers from some form of "lock in" after a few years and are loathe to change.

My tongue-in-cheek observation is all computer operating systems suck for one reason or another. Find the operating system that sucks least for the desired work flows, learn to fix or patch problems, and learn to live with and work around the remaining suckage. One way or another there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth because computers are just too complex.

Slackware "sucks" the least for me. Overwhelmingly I can massage Slackware to my tastes easier than any other distro.

I'm more than familiar with Debian and CentOS. At home I'll never use anything Red Hat. If painted into a proverbial corner I could use Debian at home. Yet while I am not a systemd basher, systemd impedes my way for how I want my home systems to function. There are some non systemd distros other than Slackware but like that favorite old pair of jeans, I'd rather keep using Slackware.

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The counterpart of Slackware-current is Debian Sid.

Nice! That's a distro I have not used; it looks interesting.
At the moment I'm running Debian, two Slackware64-current desktops, and OpenBSD. I've run Debian on and off since Etch. I retired as a public school teacher 5 years ago. At one time I built a computer lab for my students in my classroom running Etch. This drove the school IT guy crazy as he was a Windows guy. I've run Debian since 4.0, Slackware since 10.0, and OpenBSD since 5.0. I also maintain one Windows 10 Pro laptop.

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This is the same for every distribution. Love and hate relation.

My first encounter with Linux was Slack, at that time I tried various other distros, but I found Debian suited my way of working better, & have been Debian based ever since.

I look at other distros occasionally, but always return to that which I'm familiar with; I think it's the same for most long term distro users.

I very much dislike any Debian-based distro and it has zero to do with systemd. It has to do with Root. Literally everything of an administrative task (that is allowed) is all done through sudo. Not only do they not by default create your Root account, they actively thwart it. There is an upside to that beyond minimizing breakage by the unschooled which is any access to a root-only privileged file or process immediately pops up the authentication bubble for sudo password, but a great deal is essentially just disallowed. In some ways that is worse than Windows.

OpenSuSe is actually pretty decent in that one can actually administer. A root account is yours by default and it is trivial to choose any manner of bootloader one desires, for example, unlike many other distros. I still don't like how dependent most other distros, including SuSe, are on repositories. Building from source and creating a usable package are a royal PITA on almost all of them.

Arch and it's derivatives I recognize are likely good for devs who need that rolling release up-to-the-minute libraries but that's far too unstable for me and I really don't care about minimalism. I lost the desire for what is effectively almost an embedded system decades ago. Storage is cheap and abundant and Arch, Manjaro and the like ar by no means "leaner 'n meaner" than Slackware. Slackware on my boxes is over 10% faster in every benchmark I throw at them. I resent the amount of time I require to prevent or recover from disaster just for the "latest and greatest" which very often is just "the latest" and not actually "the greatest"... at least for me.

I probably should revisit Gentoo since I haven't taken it for a spin in well over 10 years and I do deeply respect how much many of it's devs have provided for Linux in general, but it is hard to overcome my prejudice instilled at it's rather silly inception, a lot of work for little, even imaginary, gain. Once again it was founded on that minimalist approach and time has shown that is a lot of work with little benefit.

Nothing I know of is as maintenance free, fast, stable, transparent and malleable as Slackware. May Patrick still be writing awesome code and integrating it into a well-oiled machine when he is 105.

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I've been using Slackware for over 28 years. Been down this road. I gave up trying other distributions along time ago.

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