Slackers computing usages and needs.
 

I want to see what Slackers mainly use their SLACKWARE MACHINES AND ONLY SLACKWARE MACHINES FOR. As for me I am attempting to use Slackware for gaming, home computing, family computing, computer programming, computer graphic design, drafting and major Office use. What do you guys use your Slackware machines for mainly (at work and/or home)?

you may find the Slackware in Academia thread interesting:
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ia-4175652176/

Bumping 9 year old threads? ;)
My apologies, I couldn't resist. :)
I mostly use my PCs for tinkering with Slackware and OpenBSD; I'm a hobbyist. As a retired person I enjoy learning new things. Great poll. Thanks.

This is an interesting post, thank you.

I too want to give openBSD a try as well and maybe one day be invited to one of their infamous hackathons - seems like a great community and a great operating system over all.

I admit to being rather confused as to what 'home computing' is. As far as I'm concerned, office work and "fun" both fall into that category so I didn't choose it.

I use my main Slackware box for three things mainly - academic/office work, general web browsing, but mostly as a hi-fi. This is why Spotify Connect is so good: I can control Spotify on my main box through my -current laptop without having to get up. I take my laptop pretty much everywhere with me and its use is mainly academic work.

I also use my main box for music recording and mixing. That should really have been an option: media production.

I additionally have two other Slackware laptops but these are unused at the moment. One of them has a very nice screen for playing Quake ['gaming' should have been an option too, it's a big enough industry to have its own category].

OpenBSD is my favourite BSD; I've used it since 5.0. I suggest trying OpenBSD in a VM, the installer is straight forward and there's good support documentation out there.

I plan on buying an old refurbished PC from Micro-center and installing it on there.

Everything I do on the home computers is based on Slackware. At home there are three primary systems using Slackware 14.2 64-bit. No other OS is used for productivity at home. At work I support other distros.

I agree with your philosophy. I plan on beating my sons if they are caught using any other operating system - I will provide them a live Slackware USB stick and so help them God I catch them using windows at school knowing full and well he has a live USB stick of Slackware. If the teacher protest I will pull him from class and home school him.

I read somewhere in this forum that in the schools they use i-do-not-know-what programs for the teachers to see remotely the desktop used by students and eventually to take over, and that the Slackware is particularly unfriendly to those programs, because the lack of LinuxPAM support.

Also I heard that Slackware is particularly unfriendly in a mixed network of computers running either Windows or Linux, because the lack of support for central authentication or whatever. Something also connected to PAM and Kerbers.

What I want to say is that very probably your son's teachers will not agree with your usb-sticks.

I chose „fun”. I published the detailed description of my computer activities here. Those thirteen activities have one common name: fun!

The computers would also need to support booting off a USB drive, and any competent administrator will disable that. My work also prevents using USB mass storage devices in our systems and will lock your account if any are detected. To get it unlocked, you have to go pretty high up the chain and it usually takes several weeks to do so (it's a REALLY big deal). But we consistently deal with sensitive information and they want to limit the chances of introducing viruses/malware into the network.

Students/workers may also sign an agreement stating they will not use any OS other than what's installed on the system (in much more legalese speak than I can muster) and breaking that agreement could lead to getting kicked out of school or getting fired.

Long story short, with school and work, sometimes your hands are tied on what OS you're able to use. The only way to change it is to somehow talk the administrators into changing or switch schools/employers.

I do a little bit of everything with my Slackware installs (-current on Desktop for GPU drivers, and 14.2 on a Lenovo T420), as a Computer Science major I spend most of my time programming on it. So I picked that.

Let's just say that "very probably" means "certainly", and that whoever is running the school's network will be extremely upset - enough to suspend your sons' accounts as a first warning. Allowing ANY unauthorised software on the school's networked computers is not something that any school can afford in this day and age.

If you feel that strongly just give them Slackware notebooks to take to school to do their work on and transfer to the school computers as necessary via a memory stick. Warn them to NEVER try to get onto the school network with them - they can only use school computers for that. I know this (Slack notebooks from home) will work because that's what I did when I was teaching.

Edit: You are, of course, within your rights as a parent to try to convince the school to move to an all Linux system, but there's too much windows only software the school depends on for student use (eg to watch films from the school library).