I guess the trick to have applications in your own home directory is to create full tree of directories starting from usr, so you will need usr/bin, usr/lib etc., I think it is possible to install even slackbuilds packages in your home directory, but managing such system can be a pain. What about libraries? Do you want to install libraries also in your home directory? If you want to prevent other users to run these particular applications, I guess, you can do this by creating group users, and only member of such group is allowed to run these applications.

@laleksic

welcome to LQ , IMO Slackware is the right "battleship" for You.

Most GTK is still GTK2, build chain is as stated of the most usable out there for upstream direct builds.

Most of the system is dependable, upgrades cleanly as per shipped documentation, and the clean system is rock solid.

Using "own software" form ~/* or from /usr/local/* as the older Slackers are accustomed to do, will surely never break the system.

Besides the build system Slackware is renowned by, it has also a flawless track record of binary compatibility among the distros that "matter"

Both XFCE and KDE shipped by Slackware are reliable, rarely glitching and thoroughly tested before picked for inclusion. While i rarely found the shipped components of KDE attrcative for actual work (and God knows i tried) there are some actually useful productivity apps. I personally rely on LibreOffice from AlienBOB's repos and "just work"

Things are looking much more bright for Slackware than ever, there are literally tonnes of preuild binary packages available across the web, even more so as "recipes" called SlackBuilds.

I found my "gray havens" with sbotools-a ports like system tailored for Slackware.

All in all give it a shot, and see for Your self -only thing You could regret is - You didn't find it earlier

Hi,
I can only tell you what works for me ... and this is something that keeps being refined even though I have used Slackware ever since it came on 24 floppies!

When partitioning your hard-drive (Yes Slackware will allow you to do this!), think ahead.

Currently, because I use EFI for booting, the hard-drive (nominally 500G) on my desktop is partitioned using gdisk as follows:-

1. EFI ... 100M
2. boot .. 100M
3. root1 . 25G
4. root2 . 25G
5. lvm ... the remainder

The two root partitions allow me to install a new version of Slackware while keeping the previous version so the size of these two partitions may increase with time but currently 25G seems good (about 43% full with a full install).

The next thing is to create an LVM volume group with partition 5 and create, at least, the following logical volumes:-

var .... mount on /var
tmp .... mount on /tmp
home ... mount on /home
local .. mount on /usr/local
opt .... mount on /opt

I initially size these at 2G each and expand them as needed.
With this setup, you have a root partition that is essentially read-only, and when (if) you install into the second root partition, all of your non-OS data/programs et al which are in your logical volume can be mounted on your new system.

I could go on ... but I wont!

Hopefully this gives you an insight into a possible structure that you can use to achieve your goals.
And as always YMMV!

cheers
pete

pete hilton
saruman@ruvolo-hilton.org

@bimboleum:
how do You know the packages of root1 vs root2 if their /var/* is shared?

other than that I find that scheme interesting and somewhat similar to mine:

since some years now I make all local software in ~/src and the handy scripts i keep in ~/bin and only few i copy to /usr/local/sbin too, for obvious purposes...

But yes I run Slackwares in parallel for the time of transition from one release to the newer , even tho I'm delaying the switch for half a year usually

Hi,
For each "root" I create separate logical volumes for /var, /usr/local and /opt.
This way anything that is unique to a particular "root" is preserved. Obviously things in /var may be "root" sensitive but also items in /opt, for example virtualbox, may be too.

I find that once I have a new "root" set up e.g /etc/fstab, network config et al, I no longer use the old "root" and so will remove the LV's that were peculiar to the old root, ready for the next round!

cheers
pete

pete hilton
saruman@ruvolo-hilton.org