Is Slackware easier to use now than it was 16 years ago?

rkelsen · 08-11-2019, 08:09 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ehartman

Yes, it did, in release 8.1, when the current package naming convention came in (7.x and 8.0 still used the 8+3 filename format) and thus enabled real updating.

You are correct, but I was referring to the appearance and interface of the installer.

mats_b_tegner · 08-11-2019, 08:49 AM

I would say yes. I started with Slackware 7.0 way back in December 1999. Back then I only had dialup internet access so buying a CD set was essential. My current full installation was in 2009. It's a lot easier to use Slackware from version 13.0 onwards compared to versions 7.0 to 10.0.

cwizardone · 08-11-2019, 08:59 AM

The first Slackware CD I purchased was dated March 1995.
Over the years I don't believe the installation procedure has changed, much, but a few things
have been made easier.
By version 13, we finally had automatic mounting of removable media. Long, long, long overdue!
Then xorg became easier, but I still do it the "old fashion way."
There are probably several other things that have "improved" over the years, but the only other item that comes to mind is NetworkManager. Oh, and PulseAudio. Some people like them, some don't. They both "just work." No fuss, no muss.
YMMV.

ehartman · 08-11-2019, 10:09 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cwizardone

The first Slackware CD I purchased was dated March 1995.

At that time I didn't have a CD-rom drive (486dx2, dual drive floppy (5.25 and 3.5") and 540 MB disk with NO room for expansion and NO USB or so yet for external drives), so up to and including Slackware 4.0 I downloaded the separate floppy contents (at work!).
BTW: that 486 was my "machine at work" at the time, at home I still had "only" a 286.
Several years later I bought my first Pentium (/60) which did have a CD-rom drive (sbpcd interface) and installed Slackware 7.1 on it (image downloaded and burned on another machine at work).
I still got the complete (and updated) 4.0 tree and the 7.x iso images.

hazel · 08-11-2019, 10:33 AM

When I first started using Linux in 2004 or thereabouts, I was told that Slackware was the only Linux you installed from floppies.

enorbet · 08-11-2019, 11:27 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hazel

When I first started using Linux in 2004 or thereabouts, I was told that Slackware was the only Linux you installed from floppies.

Hello hazel,

Interesting!... though a bit confusing since even OS/2 Warp 3 circa 1994, though still possible to install from some ~30 floppies, was preferred to be installed via 3 floppies that could be easily altered for variables and then it asked for the CD if one chose the CD version boot disks. By 1996 when OS/2 Warp 4 was released, it received considerable flack for not having a CD-only installer with no floppies required. IBM apparently preferred the flexibility of having an easily alterable environment and never officially released a CD-Only install. eComStation took over OS/2 and the first thing they did was go CD-Only in 2001. By 1998 it was really all about Opticals, at least here in the US..

In 2004, Slackware had released v10, a very solid release btw (I kept a 10.2 machine running up until v13 was released), and though floppy images were available, I certainly didn't use them by that late date. Right around that time/version the initial array of needed installer kernels would no longer fit on a single floppy, unless you chose one specifically for a hardware environment. By 2007, when v12 was released the array of specialized kernels was no longer needed when the "huge" kernels were released reflecting that extremely few PC OEMs even offered floppy drives anymore. On my end I still used floppies for deep level stuff but by 1999 I had sold even my Zip drive since it was obvious that Optical drives were going to be the winner for some time, although I did entertain the possibility of Magneto-Opticals for a time.

Just a few weeks ago I tossed out my last machine with a floppy drive in it, finally admitting to myself I hadn't used a single floppy in a decade. Now what do I do with some 1000 3.5 inch disks?

I knew people from other distros consider Slackware .... ummm... "quaint" but it ain't. I didn't know it was considered an antiquity.

ehartman · 08-11-2019, 01:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by enorbet

In 2004, Slackware had released v10, a very solid release btw (I kept a 10.2 machine running up until v13 was released)

My old (year 2000) Dell Pentium III system still is running Slackware 10.2 (it doesn't have the capabilities, especially RAM, to run newer releases and it's not connected to the internet anyway).

ehartman · 08-11-2019, 02:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hazel

When I first started using Linux in 2004 or thereabouts, I was told that Slackware was the only Linux you installed from floppies.

No, version 10 (released in 2004) wasn't installable (although it WAS bootable from a 3.5" floppy) from pure floppies anymore. Somewhere between 7.1 and 8.0 the change was made to not split every category into separate floppy-sized directories:

Code:

drwxr-xr-x 2 root root   10240 2001-06-28 10:03:48 a1
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root    6144 2001-06-20 20:53:24 ap1
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root    6144 2001-05-29 01:38:00 d1
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root    2048 2000-04-25 03:51:57 e1
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root    2048 2001-05-23 22:38:19 f1
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root   12288 2001-06-22 04:08:49 gtk1
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root    2048 2001-05-29 05:14:30 k1
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root    8192 2001-06-14 03:14:15 kde1
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root    8192 2001-06-24 21:59:24 n1
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root    2048 2001-02-11 09:20:54 t1
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root    2048 1999-06-28 02:11:33 tcl1
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root    4096 2001-06-14 03:21:18 x1
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root    4096 2001-05-03 04:44:25 xap1
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root    2048 2001-04-23 05:23:21 xv1
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root    2048 1999-09-29 22:29:34 y1

(from the 8.0 iso)
Later the "1" (for "first floppy") was dropped.

Slackware 7.1 still had separate directories for each floppy:

Code:

drwxr-xr-x 2 root root   4096 2000-06-21 20:50:59 a1
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root   2048 2000-06-21 20:51:11 a10
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root   2048 2000-06-21 20:51:11 a11
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root   2048 2000-06-21 20:51:12 a12
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root   2048 2000-06-21 20:51:12 a13
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root   2048 2000-06-21 20:51:12 a14
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root   2048 2000-06-21 20:51:43 a15
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root   2048 2000-06-21 20:51:13 a16
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root   2048 2000-06-21 20:51:01 a2
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root   2048 2000-06-21 20:51:03 a3
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root   2048 2000-06-21 20:51:04 a4
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root   2048 2000-06-21 20:51:06 a5
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root   2048 2000-06-21 20:51:07 a6
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root   2048 2000-06-21 20:51:08 a7
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root   2048 2000-06-21 20:51:09 a8
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root   2048 2000-06-21 20:51:10 a9

for the "a" and "n" set only, so you could get the network up and download the rest of the packages.

PS: 7.1 was released in 2000, 8.0 in 2001, they were the last ones releases to use the old package names (without version numbers).

TheRealGrogan · 08-11-2019, 04:55 PM

I find Slackware to be the easiest distribution there is, because it doesn't get in the way of old school users. I have much more difficulty with so called "easy" distributions because I have to circumvent so much crap :-)

(for example, you wouldn't recognize my Manjaro setup with all the work I've done to it)

goumba · 08-11-2019, 05:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lysander666

I would love to see an example of an old /etc/rc.d/rc.module and xorg.conf file so that I can appreciated that I don't have to edit them. Though that depends on how involved they were, commenting out the odd line doesn't sound too hard.

Not too crazy, but a typical config for an ATI card with a CRT:
https://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/html_sing...-HOWTO/#AEN240

If you feel like putting your reading hat on:
https://xfree86.org/current/XF86Config.5.html

andrew.46 · 08-11-2019, 07:31 PM

Unlike most of the more experienced Slackware users here in 2003 I would have still been with Windows (whichever version was out then) with Ubuntu Breezy Badger coming to me in 2005. But it is very interesting to hear the old stories

enorbet · 08-12-2019, 04:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ehartman

My old (year 2000) Dell Pentium III system still is running Slackware 10.2 (it doesn't have the capabilities, especially RAM, to run newer releases and it's not connected to the internet anyway).

Just FTR until about 2 years ago I had an ancient Sony Vaio PII 433MHz laptop maxed out at 512MB RAM running Slackware 13.37. It was agonizingly slow to boot but once up it was slow, but not at all painful since the greatest bottleneck then is network bandwidth and graphics settings. If your box isn't involved in internet, then, if configured right, 512MB is not a huge handicap for OpSys version. Only how fast your graphics can paint a page might be, but the most RAM intensive work will be similar on 10.2 compared to most newer releases. The version footprint is very similar, almost identical or can be configured so.

pchristy · 08-13-2019, 10:04 AM

I can't recall how long I've been using Slackware now, but I think it was around the time Slackware-8.0 was released. I had been using OS/2 Warp quite happily, but when support for that was dropped, I decided to try something else. There was a Red Hat release on a magazine disk, so I tried it and got absolutely nowhere with it! Then I found a cover disk with VectorLinux (based on Slackware), and found that very easy to live with compared to Red Hat. After a year or so on Vector, I decided to stop messing round with a clone, and try the real thing. Never had a problem, and never looked back.

Occasionally I will install Mageia for a family member or friend who is not computer literate. It is easy to live with if you are just a simple user, but if you have a problem or want a specific piece of software that isn't in their repository, it can be a pig! And I don't know if its just me, but I have never managed to successfully install any of the 'buntus! Slackware, no problem! 'buntu, fail every time!

So no, I don't think Slackware has become easier to install, because I've never had a problem installing it in the first place!

;-)

--
Pete

enorbet · 08-13-2019, 11:47 AM

I find that installation of any opsys is quite routine if one plans and creates partitions ahead of time and labels them. Not every opsys or distro displays partition labels (Slack doesn't unless you run cfdisk) but it helps on some though just knowing exactly what partition to install to and then which will get the bootloader avoids many, many pitfalls. Slackware's installer for me is just the best.

@pchristy - Wow! another OS/2 geek! Hiya!Were you a fan of Clear and Simple? and did you ever do emx runtimes and install Enlightenment on Warp?

folkenfanel · 08-13-2019, 12:22 PM

There were SlackBuilds those days (that's how Slackware packages are built anyway), there wasn't slackbuilds.org as it is these days.

Hardware is easier to set up and running now.

Other than that there is not much difference. Memory footprint is larger but again, the kernel is larger these days.

So it's neither noticeably easier, nor noticeably harder to use. Maybe harder to maintain in some parts (Firefox for instance with its mania of reinventing the wheel every 3 releases, GTK+3 the same breaking compatibility with theming and changing the API every couple months, things like that. Not really Slackware's fault, but upstream). I think that's why Patrick removed GNOME.

These days I'm mostly using Tor Browser for everyday browsing, not because it's inherently more "secure", but because it's more stable (read, the UI tends to look the same without wild redesigns), than Firefox.