Hello,

I have been a slackware user since 7.0, and it has always been everything I had come to expect from a distro. My love for slackware was reassured when I had brief flings with SuSe, RH (and it's incestuous cousin Mandrake), after which I managed to convince the organization I was working for at the time to adopt slack as their distro of choice. Months after I finished my project there and I am still hearing positive response about slack (they have even gone from running SMB on linux to running NFS/LPD - sorry not cups - on the Win2K machines that they still have lingering around for certain apps).

Out of the box, slack is more secure than any distro I have tried, it is easier to modify (without breaking the distro), it is lean, stable, has a great set of start up scripts, it can be reinstalled (if ever necessary) over a simple remote shell (no X server necessary), has 'just the right amount' of automated admin tools and is a great distro overall. Kudos to Patrick.

Which brings me to the question I was asked not too long ago: aren't all those things also true of Debian (well, minus it's legendary screwed up start up scrips that even a non-Debian user has heard volumes about)? Don't they have an awesome package management system second only to BSD's "ports"? Aren't they as stable even in the "unstable" branch? What about them not depending on commercial funding (being a completely community led project)? I recall Chris Lumens (and one other guy) being fired from slack just over a year ago due to a funding cut... (possible logical error in that last point - I'll see if anyone agrees)

I have never tried Debian because I have never had a need to deviate from slack, and I will probably not have the time to play with it in the near future anyway (unless someone is paying me to do it :). However, the lingering question remains - why slack over debian?

I do now want to sound aggressive or arrogant when I say that I don't need to hear replies praising the virtues of slack - I am familiar with those virtues at length. Feel free however, to correct any errors that may have made it into this post. I mostly want to hear about Debian (good and bad things) and how this relates to slack, maybe even do some slack-bashing, or at least look at it with a critical eye... Maybe I should crosspost this to a Debian forum (thinking out loud)...

I am trying to provoke an argument (discussion - if we are not going to take opposing viewpoints) during which some of the deeper issues can come to light.

Anyway, don't have time to proof read this, gotta catch the bus to university... my only class today is Operating Systems. Maybe I can bring something from that class into this discussion:)

Later,
Dan.

I too have been using Slack since 7.0 and generally like it. My main linux box currently has Slack 8.1 on it. My only gripe with Slack is package management. For adding or upgrading applications it works fine but for bigger upgrades (i.e. kde 3.1) it's a major chore. I tried Gentoo because of the portage package system which in concept sounds good but is buggy as hell. I recently tried to upgrade the Gentoo core system ('emerge -u system') packages and all the initialization scripts got clobbered in the process. Thank God it was on one of my spare 'experimental' hard drives and not the main system. Gentoo is a fairly new distro and not quite mature yet. It's promising but has a way to go. I'm going to finally give Debian a try. Along with Slack it's one of the original 'old guard' distributions and has a very large user base. I've heard it's a little tricky to get it initially installed but it will be the last 'install' you ever to do for that particular machine. We'll see.

I myself have never really had problems with pkgtool. I never use pkgtool itself, but rather all the supporting utilities (makepkg, explodepkg, upgradepkg, installpkg, removepkg). What would be the problem associated with upgrading a large number of packages? It would be tedious to type in "upgradepkg oldpackage%newpackage", altough I think the intended use of these tools is something like:

go to kde3 directory on slack8.1 cd, type "removepkg *"
go to kde3.1 directory on hdd, type "installpkg *"

voila.

Anyway, sharing my "user experience".

I started using slackabout the time of 8.0. A little while before that I was trying many other distros as well. When I first installed Slack it took me a while to adjust coming from a Red Hat / SuSe enviorment, but man was it worth it. After Slack I was feeling tempted to try out another...Debian. I was not pleased with the scripts and the package management. Actually, I still have a bad taste in my mouth today from that distro. If you are a developer at heart and enjoy overly painstaking activities, give this distro a try.

Hi. I'll throw my two cents in, as someone who is running about 25 systems with Debian right now. I came into Linux a while back.. Back when Slack was one of the only options around, and had even played around with it before that, but not on a regular basis. I used Slackware, for the most part, and experimented with all the others. I still have a disgust for Red Hat and Mandrake that is matched only by my disgust for Microsoft. (Red Hat doesn't like me, ergo I don't like it. Nothing against the distro, we just agree to disagree. )


One day, a friend of mine, much more of an Elmer than I, offered to take me under his wing, and started me off with a nice fresh Debian system. We spent the weekend going through the install, setting up cron jobs to automatically download system security updates, testing out my system, getting down to a -512K kernel, et cetera. Once it was set up, that system hummed along nicely. That system is still running, and still as stable as ever. This training, and learning of the way that Debian worked *really* encouraged me. Having seen how easily I could test out new packages, I quickly built a spare system, and eventually it allowed me to move completely away from Microsoft's clutches. This was something I had never been able to do with Microsoft. I love it as a 'beginner's' linux, due to the fact that if someone wants a program, they don't even have to use the words "source code" to get. I didn't have to sweat dependency issues, worry about updates, or damn near anything else, because it could all be taken care of with an "apt-get" and a few words. If I didn't like said program I could get rid of it with an "apt-get remove programname" and voila, happy system again.


This allowed me to concentrate on the things I really wanted to learn, and to test out programs little by little. Having that as an option *really* put me where I wanted to be, and I've used Debian to convert 10 or more people in the last year to Linux as a full time OS. The only problem I've ever had with it was its weird way of working cron, but you can just use cron like you always did, and it will function as normal. (Cron is set up into multiple directories by default, but if you just make your normal cron files, they function as well.)

The file system is laid out well, things are organized in a nice way, the updates are easy, it's available for many different architectures (I have it running on an Alpha, 2 Sun boxes, and several PowerPCs) and languages (American English, 한국어 (Hangul/Korean), and français(French)) and I'm trying to get some help translating it to Navajo (my native language).

I've heard many people complain about its installation, but only people online. Anyone I've ever handed the CD to, and told them to give it a shot, has never complained, and in fact like its textual interface over the more graphical interface of many. There is something to be said for their 'ethics' issues, it's true, where they are somewhat extreme in their translation of "free", and don't want tainted (non-free) software on their systems, but hey, they don't force you. They just recommend it.

Hrmm.. if anything else comes to mind, I'll throw it in here.
But to sum up, I find it excellent for those moving from Windows to Linux who have at least some technical background. I would also use it to introduce someone to computers who had never really used one before that wanted to learn a lot about them.

That's my .02 cents, and I hope it helped shed some light on why it is my main distro. I still respect the hell out of Slackware, have an LFS system, a BSD Unix system or three, and a few systems running Sun Solaris (Sparc boxes). But Debian is a sure winner for me, every time.

Thanks for listening.

Well I downloaded and installed Woody 3.0-r1. I'd say the installation was about the same difficulty as Slack but definitely easier then Gentoo. I just started playing around with apt-get and installed a bunch of applications. Everything worked right away and apt-get even updated my kde toolbars. Slack users can definitely appreciate that. I'm going to try an upgrade from stable to testing and post my experience. If everything goes the way it has so far I might have to make this my main distro. By far this is the best package system I have seen in any linux distribution I have tried (Slack, RH, Mandrake, Gentoo).

Not much experience with Slack (loading it as we speak), but man, Debian startup scripts are extremely fragile. Anyone else notice that small system changes really mess up your scripts? I guess that's the downside of getting ONLY what you need from a script. When you need something else, it's not already there bloating things up.

I have been a Slackware user since 8.0 and I really love it. It was my first Linux, and I have never tried any other (I do use FreeBSD and I plan on checking out Plan 9). I have been itching to check out Debian, as well. My only beef with Slackware is it's package management system, where Debian's rocks. It needs to be understood, though, that if you use Slackware you really don't need a package management system, even though it's nice to have anyways.

It has come to my attention, recently, that there is a project in development called the Slaktool project ( http://slaktool.sourceforge.net/ ) which is basically an improved Slackware package manager. It also has a graphical interface for GNOME and/or KDE. I suggest you guys try it out, which is what I will be doing this weekend.

I may check out Debian this weekend, as well, if I have time.

This one makes updating way too easy...(especially if you're running Slack 9 Beta)

http://freshmeat.net/projects/swaret...c_id=147%2C253

Interesting. I'll have to check that one out.

That is one reason why Debian will always be a notch up from Gentoo for me as apt-get will update the gui menu when you install new apps. Portage just doesn't do that. I also like the feeling of having just what I want on the system and not ever having to deal with dependancies (well rarely having to deal with them). I was shamed when I first started tinkering with distros and couldn't get Debian running X. But after a bit of experience and patience Debian is by far the most usefull disto I've used. You can even install a kernel with the apt system! (the "Debian way")

Erm... my experience after using several distro, i would say slackware is the most beautiful linux.... good either for expert and newbie.... 1 thing i prefer slackware more than debian is that, slackware always provides the latest programs ie, KDE...
althou debian has a tremendous updating program implemented, i find it hard via a 56k modems...

Hi all!

First of all, I really like Slack and am currently using 8.1. But I've been using Debian Linux for the last 3 or 4 years. It's been a wonderful operating system, very stable. I've tried Yellow Dog, Redhat, Mklinux, and now I'm trying Slackware. If you can read between the lines, maybe you can guess that I've used Linux on a few Macintosh machines. But I guess my point is, I've gotten quite a bit of experience with Linux over the years and have been exposed to different systems.

Briefly, I'm going to list a few strengths of Slackware. (1) It's more up to date: KDE 3.0.1 compared to Debian's KDE 2.x in woody. This allows me to use some of the newer programs on the net that require me to use KDE 3.XX. (2) Slackware is not really that hard to install. Someone said that if you wanted to learn how to use Linux you should start with Slackware. I took this to mean that I would be installing about everything from sources; but that hasjavascript:smilie('')n't been the case. I was afraid of walking into a maze of software. Having wandered through years of installing Debian Linux on m68k macs has made me appreciate the ease of installing Linux on i386 machines. Slackware installation wasn't that bad. The only real problem was trying to figure out how to get started. The documentation is kind of sketchy for getting it to start, especially since my Burned Slackware install CD didn't work. And (3), Slackware runs pretty fast.

Now a few gripes about slack. They advertise 4 CD's that they sell, but I can only download 1. Somebody's holding out on me? With Debian I've got 7 CD's full of packages to install. Now for the slackware package utilities. Actually, this isn't a gripe. It's just that after using Debian's dselect utility, slack's pkgtool just doesn't come anywhere close. The only other gripe I have about slack is that it isn't as easy to use as Debian. But then again, that's what I was expecting and I wasn't disappointed. Though I do miss some of the ease of use that Debian provides with their KDE for allowing the root user to give authority to users for audio, CD's, etc. I am still trying to figure out how to do this with slackware. But then again, that's why I switched to Slack. Now I'll have to read the manuals.

I guess, in conclusion, when you weigh the pros and cons of Slackware and Debian, they come out about even. It's just that Debian has a whole lot more packages.
By the way. RedHat runs too slow compared to Debian or Slackware. And I get the impression that Redhat just cares about RedHat and no one else. I have a 40 GB hardrive up and running. About 24GB for Debian, and 16GB for Slack. I did have RedHat on that 16GB, But Slack is going to stay. No more RedHat for my drive.

Hank

Well, I just installed Debian this weekend and here's what I think about it compared to Slackware:

After installing Debian, I had an internet connection up and going in under a minute. No trouble at all. I didn't like the Debian install at all, though. It was dumb and ugly. I also do not like how Debian has it's own little version of KDE/GNOME (i.e. it has Debian icons and all that). In my opinion that is very lame and seems redhat-ish. It also shows me that under Debian you don't have as much control as you would under Slackware. The package system is great, on the other hand, though it seems like you would become completely dependant upon it. If you start of with Slackware you can easily work with any other system, whereas if you use Debian from the beginning and try Slackware, I feel that you would have a hard time. I think that Debian users are very Internet-dependant. If you don't have an internet connection then you really couldn't update packages or any of that.

Over all, Debian is OKAY. I don't like the fact that I don't have as much control over things like I do in Slackware. Of course I have only been using it for about a day so far, and I will continue to do so, and I am usre that I will find more features that I like. Nothing except FreeBSD's ports beats the Debian package system, though.

Anyways, that's my two cents.

Well I haven't been using Slackware for a long time - just a couply of days ... unfortunately that HDD gave up life, so. I'm using Woody for a couple of weeks now and I admit I like it ...

There are things I don't like - for instance that the packages were outdated - sendmail to name just an important one. This is what disappoints me personaly like you can read in this thread

Everything I really want is a distribution that has following key features:

• security is taken seriously (part of package management)
• high performance and stability
• possibility to update the system through package management

About the package management, it doesn't need to be updated if it's not for security reasons (and that for maybe cause of some dependencies). I do not need any GUI since the OS will be used as server ... I do not care if I need to configure stuff myself if that's the only way to go. But I do care about the box security being one of the most important key features like I do not want to run an HTTPS-Webserver where a private key is stored on an insecure system ...