As I've mentioned occasionally, installing Slackware is so easy that the first day I tried it, I installed it three times.

I installed it last night. I broke my Debian Sid install (I had a brain skip at the wrong time--it was all my fault), so I decided to replace it with Slackware. It had developed dustbunnies over the past four years and the recent implementation of SystemD in Sid has been the source of much annoyance.

I grabbed my Slackware 14.1 disks and, within an hour of starting the install, I was back on Linux Questions on Slackware --Current with Opera and Keepassx both installed and working. It would have been much less time, but I told the installer to check for bad blocks as it formatted the partitions.

As I tidied up the install today, I realized that I know a lot more about using Linux than I did in April 2005, and LQ shares much of the responsibility for that, as does the Slackware community.

Thanks to all for all the help over the years.

I've learned a lot over the past 15 years with Slackware as well. I've still got Slackware chugging away as my primary system on my desktop and use it for all kinds of R&D with LFS as well. I've killed the OS at least 20+ times doing research work with various goals, and always I find Slackware so easy and simple to get going again.

I've learned about using the basics of simple scripting to do lots of work so much so I dove into LFS and really was able to pull from my experience with Slackware heavily to ease myself into the new system. I've done work importing packages to LFS and all thanks to what I learned via Slackware and the SlackBuild scripts, as well as the usage of the very simplistic bsd style sysvinit. In fact our Runit work over at LFS draws from bsd style init scripting which I can thank Slackware for indirectly or directly.

I love Linux thanks to Slackware. I always had seen that little blue (S) symbol for years back on the old Linux.org website that used to advertise all the distributions. Makes me glad I found it, and gave it a chance.

The LQ and Slackware community hasn't always seen eye to eye with me, but to learn one must first fail, sometimes miserably.

Same here, Slackware makes you learn, and I've learned a lot over the years. Thanks to the Slackware team for the greatest distro.

I think one of Slackware's key structural points is the learning curve. If Slackware didn't have it, and didn't make you learn system core basics using things like shell scripts, settings up plaintext configuration files, reading plaintext logs, command line based applications, and other valuable traits, one of which was touched on here recently in the forum... dependency resolution, Slackware would be just another distribution. Plus, Slackware does enforce the fact of reading documentation.

Hell, I never learned anything off my Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, or Ubuntu installs... other than how to use a GUI more.

SuSe 6.1 was my first useful distro and came with a printed manual that was a very useful place to start learning (still keep it on my shelf).

Then Mandrake 7.1 thru Mandriva 2005 was my standard - great distro! But I found many quirks with GUI config tools and urpmi. For example, any change to a network device config with the GUI tools would stupidly mangle the hosts file, my little corner of the world depended on static IPs so I had to understand and work around that, among other things.

My engineering background tended to guide me to look for the general cases, i.e. GNU/Linux as opposed to distro specific, whenever possible. As a result, I found myself repeatedly ending up at LQ's Slackware pages!

So I learned, very effectively at that time, how to manage my Mandrake/Mandriva box's configs by reading the Slackware forum! I did not always find an answer directly applicable to Mandrake, but I usually came away with enough knowledge to figure things out on my own! So to echo ReaperX7, the Slackware learning curve and the knowledge base that has grown from it are useful in unexpected ways!

When it came time to look for an alternative OS I was already somewhat familiar with Slackware and adopted it as my own, and finally joined LQ - should have done so much sooner! Since moving everything to Slackware and continuing to grow with it, and with the LQ Slackware community, my own knowledge has increased even more than ever before!

Thanks to Pat, team, contributors and all the nice people here at LQ!

1 members found this post helpful.

I second that! I have definitely learned so many new things when I decided to switch to Slackware. And there's always a bunch of enthusiasts here that knows how to do certain things.

Slackware does expect you to do your homework. Once you figure out Slackware, no other distro can intimidate you, because you have learned how to figure stuff out.

When I was a rank newb, I must say I never met the elitist RTFM geek of legend. The folks I ran into here and on the Slackware mailing list and newsgroup were always helpful.

(I looked in on the old Slackware newsgroup recently. The one troll who used to frequent it is still there, but he's also over annoying people at the Mint newsgroup too.)

And it's not like we thump RTFM all the time like a Bible. It's just good common sense to read documentation, and we want you to have Good Common Sense.

You have to approach Linux like a college course, Yoda's advise to Luke Skywalker on being a Jedi, Sun Tsu's Art of War, and Bruce Lee's take on The Power of the Fluid.

You have to learn first before you can mold and adapt and shape yourself to Linux. If you fail, go back and learn more, or unlearn what you have learned, and relearn again if there is a better way.

Hell as many times as I've effed up here, sometimes majorly and pissed off Eric to where he'd probably run me over with a steamroller, he always has that little bit of information hidden in what he says, "Stop, Go Back, Relearn, and then come back again.".. and he has been right at times.

I will blow my own horn to this effect: As a veteran of BBS's and Usenet (I've been flamed on the granddaddy of them all, alt.folklore.urban, which is now but a shadow), I knew how to ask a question.

1. Tell what you want to do,
2. tell what research you've done,
3. tell what you tried,
4. tell what happened, then
5. ask your question.

2 members found this post helpful.

Same here, I learnt a lot over the last 14 years... used Slackware for at least 6 years of it, and now just having fun Ubuntu and it's off shoots.

Installed Slackware the first time back in the late 90's. There was no Linuxquestions back then. All I had was a CD, a bunch of floppies and a copy of a book written by PV (see attached jpg). The installer has always been so simple and reliable that I've installed and tested Slackware dozens of times since then on different machines. With the availability of LQ community and Google and other resources on the internet I decided to switch to it exclusively about 6 years ago.

Attached Thumbnails

 

Yeah, Slackware makes a hell of a learning experience. And it's also great for teaching Linux.

http://www.microlinux.fr/download/fo...istrateurs.pdf

2 members found this post helpful.

I am not in a mood of looking backward. Thinking to what I will have a chance to learn makes me happy.

EDIT Looking forward to learning occasions Slackware will continue to provide me.

1 members found this post helpful.

True. I learnt most of my Linux skills through Slackware. Thanks a lot.

I got my first computer in 1992 while I was a university sudent. I remember, like it was yesterday, a fellow student telling me that since I was starting I should try a 32 but operating system called Linux (as opposed to dos 5 / windows 3.1 that were 16 bit at the time) ... and handed me 35 1.44 Mb floppies that I should copy and instal. 35 floppies was a large amount for any software at the time, doom was only 4 floppies if I remember right.
He added that the full installation was 90 Mb (I had a 120Mb WD drive so I could still have dos/windows on the remaining space) and that I should use a special tool to copy the floppies as dos did not understand the content of these floppies. I don't remember exactly what distribution he gave me (but at that time I suspect it was SLS). It took me a long time just to copy the floppies ... then my firs install took me for ever answering yes or no to every single package ... and just to make things worse I did something wrong in the final stages of the installation. As an absolute beginner I had no idea how to fix it so I installed again. It became clear to me right from the start that Linux was very unforgiving if you make mistakes but left you with much freedom to do wise and foolish stuff.

For the most I was answering yes/no to which packages were to be installed based on tossing a coins, and even if each choice did tell you a little about it's use, it all meant so little to someone starting off. I managed to install all the stuff required for the compiler to work but I had not installed nroff/groff so man did not work but at the time I did not even know what man was (I suspect I did not read carefully some descriptions). I had also installed X11 but was unable to configure it for years (I think the firs time I got X11 to work I was already installing GLX from cdrom).
At the time I still dual booted both Linux and dos so I spent a lot of time trying to do on Linux the same things that I was doing on dos, and believe me that without man even the most simple stuff was hard.
It was only much later on that, while asking a fellow student for advice on how to do something, I was told that it was explained quite well in the man page. I went back home and found out that man was telling me that the text could not be formatted because groff was missing. At the time I had no idea how to add missing packages but to proud to admit it, and besides that my installation might have even lacked the tools required for adding the missing packages, so I installed a third time.
From then on man became a valuable information source as there was no google at the time (not internet browsers for that matter).

I'm probably baring the hell out of the reader so I better stop with the good old memories.
To put it in short: lack of time has made me try other distributions several times (Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu and what more) but none of them managed to bias me away from Slackware ... not even Debian (or Debian derivates) with the huge benefit of being able to "apt-get install" almost anything managed to pull me away from Slackware.