fair enough, I had not checked there.

my point was that it was (relatively) easy for me to just write that build script when I needed the software.

Like I said, that' just because you have been habituated with Slackware's SlackBuilds and you have less experience with Debian or RPM build systems. Then this experience is subjective.

For someone who used Debian or a RPM based distro for ten years of more, the experience would differ fundamentally.

I for one, IF I will look back, I believe that the easiest way to build packages is with rpmbuild and its .spec files.

The macros language of those .spec files is fantastic powerful and their design is really useful when you want to build split packages.

BTW, how you do in a SlackBuild when you want to use a remote source file, BUT with checksum after downloading?

I will show how they do the same thing on .spec files, as example.

I am. As I am comfortable with Slackware as a whole. I feel like I am being dragged into an Slackware vs Debian dispute, something that I never intended. Slackware is fine with me and better for me. That's all.

Debian vs/ Slackware? No contest for me.

I refuse to have to wrestle against all the implementations that make it a royal PITA to even launch an app with real root privileges let alone create an actual root account as in Debian. I can actually see how and why many like Debian, but I formatted it's partitions in less than 5 months. OpenSuse might last close to a year, but Slackware has lasted 21 years for me.

Granted, it did take me a few years to stop trying to make other distros be more like Slackware, and judge them on their own merits, but that was over 15 years ago and some of those distros were paid only, like Corel and Xandros, which both accepted debs and rpms. PopOS lasted a month. Manjaro, 2. Originally Arch lasted over a year about 5 years ago, but a recent revisit demonstrated it was the SOS and it didn't last 2 weeks.

The upshot is, it's not like I am ignorant of what other distros offer, and some have actual advantage for some use cases, but Slackware, for me, does them all better and gives me more control in doing so... and rarely wastes my time doing it.

Slackware and similar distributions are just trying to protect something very important. Don't want to go in details. Something say Debian, Ubuntu - have lost. It needs to be protected - when finally people got tired of Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu - as they are now today - they will rediscover this for themselves. As something new - breath of fresh air. We need to run Slackware to assure Linux won't die.

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Yes. With Slackware I can do what I want rather than having someone else's ideas about what I need rammed down my throat.

Last time I tried Debian, it wouldn't let me install Firefox. I asked why on a forum, and they told me I had to install something called IceWeasel instead. What the heck is IceWeasel? I just wanted Firefox. A simple request. Nobody outside the Debian community had ever heard of IceWeasel. Admittedly, this was a long time ago. But that was just one constraint which annoyed me more than could be considered reasonable.

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Sure, and 30000 (at least) of them is garbage. Binaries for wm's which author claim was made as exercise. I run Debian I installed tons of that garbage - was curious about those "enormous" number of packages.

Iceweasel is just unbranded firefox. There's a whole suite of those things. For example thunderbird becomes icedove. It's a way of getting round the Mozilla licence's restriction on using their brand names. But I believe Debian have now gone back to using the branded version.

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WAS. Until 2016, when Debian (and Ubuntu) resolved their disagreement with Mozilla Foundation and switched back to the original naming. Yeah, crazy things can happen on Democratic Republic of Debian. Of course, everything in the name of Freedom.

Also, the @rkelsen's story is an indication of WHEN he tried Debian. At least 5 years ago.

BUT, on 5 years many things happened in the software world - it wasn't frozen in a fridge as far as I know...

Anyway, it's an enjoying fresh story - usually the ghost stories ventilated around here are at least 20 years old.

Since you love to take a single thing out of a post that is wrong even when it has nothing to do with the overall topic of the post, I'm going to do it here.

SBo was officially endorsed by Pat back in 2016. Months before the release of 14.2...

Good day!

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Ok. But I wanted Firefox. The only way to get it was to bypass the so-called "freedom creating" package management system.
Haha... So they adopted systemd in the name of freedom? That's where they lost me. If I want sh_t on my machine, I'll install Windows.
LC, you might need to get to a hospital to get that burn looked at.

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Actually it was 8 years ago. I haven't tried it again since reading about this: https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2014...ed-by-the-nsa/
Security holes are security holes, be they democratically elected or not.

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slackrepo does just that very thing. If memory serves me well, src2pkg could also do that very thing (http://distro.ibiblio.org/amigolinux/download/src2pkg/) if you wanted it to do so.

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I am definitely not willing to enter a distro war related debate, but I will just say this:

tl;dr. In the long run, Slackware requires less love and affection (read: maintenance effort) and causes fewer problems than any other distro I know. This has to do with (non-dependency resolving) package management as well as many other decisions made by Pat V. that might, a first glance, make Slackware look a bit like an anachronism. As a matter of fact, it's a modern distro that shines with stability, package quality and a helpful and friendly and active community.


First, a little history, how I cam to Slackware. As a long-yeared SUSE user (before it was named OpenSUSE) I ran into a situation where I couldn't install it anymore on my old laptop. The installation system required 64 MB of RAM, but I only had 40 MB. So I tried many distros, with RPM, Deb and whatnot. I tried to get around Slackware, because at that time it had an image of being manageable only by gurus --- which I never intended or pretended to be. But, in the end it was the only distro with a current kernel and a reasonably current selection of software that would install on my old laptop. It took me over 2 years from then on in order to understand, why there are so many die-hard Slackware fans and what the real benefits of Slackware actually are, and finally to make it my #1 distro. Since then it's my main system, but I am still always running one or two systems with OpenSUSE, because it's an excellent distro, too, and *because, not although* it takes a totally different approach.

So here are my 0.02 EUR.

1. Why not Debian for me? I have never had a good user experience with Debian, but I have a lot of admiration for the technical achievement. Debian proves that a rock-solid operating system can be built based on free and open source software only. Which is a huge merit, IMHO, and to the benefit of all Linux users, and in particular for the adoption of Linux and (F)OSS in corporate environments in general. Still, it's not my distro of choice. Thing is: There's always a right way, a wrong way and a Debian way of doing things. I prefer the right way, instead of a (possibly very viable) non-standard, exotic way. Debian always felt kind of strange to me. But this is personal preference, and by no means a judgement regarding the quality of the distro or the huge catalog of software packages available for it.

Over the years I tried out many other distros. Now, Debian was not for me, but what made me stick with Slackware as my go-to distro? This:

2. Stability in the sense that what I had to learn about system management still applies to a large part today, about 15 years later. The management of other distros has changed fundamentally during that time. Regarding OpenSUSE, it doesn't matter that much thanks to YaST which is a great management tool, again, after a few years of severe performance problems with package management, certain inconsistencies and not-so-great stability (no show-stoppers, and still usable, after all, just not great). However, if look under the hood, a LOT has changed. Recommendation: If you want to use OpenSUSE, get familiar with YaST. If you don't like YaST (which I personally do, and all the beforementitioned issues have been fixed in recent releases), choose another distro.

3. Package management and consistency. My experiments with *buntus and some other distros always ended in dependency hell after a few months, whereas my oldest Slackware system has been upgraded, but never re-installed since 2013. However, while I think the approach to package management of Slackware is the best, recent versions of OpenSUSE prove that other approaches can provide similarly good results regarding package quality based on RPM. Only thing is, that if something doesn't work as expected the issue is much harder to track down than in Slackware. But then, such issues come up very rarely.

4. Community. Probably the most important factor for choosing a distro, IMHO. The Slackware community is helpful, shows endless patience even with all-time newbies like me, and knowledgeable. I can say similar things of some OpenSUSE forums. In comparison, I wouldn't call the Debian folks unfriendly, just a bit more single-minded and "elitist" (I don't know a better word to describe it). In other words, I have never felt as home in the Debian/*buntu world as in the Slackware and OpenSUSE communities. This social factor matters even more for me than the above mentioned technical aspects, actually.

What almost made me switch in the past...? Yes, there have been moments when I considered switching to something else. Just two examples:

i) Sendmail was considered an unsecure nightmare and Slackware was left as one of very few distros sticking with it, when everyone else moved to Postfix. Now, with Slackware 15.0, Postfix will replace Sendmail, finally, in Slackware, too. Funny: To my knowledge, most of the issued have been ironed out of Sendmail, and actually it seems to be easier to add modules like malware scanners to it than to Postfix, nowadays. Not sure (and not willing to speculate) why Pat V. decided to switch, now.

ii) Slackware 14.2 has gotten really a bit long in the tooth. The standard packages for Firefox and some libraries aren't up to what the alternatives offer their users, so that some newer 3rd-party software would not install or run properly. However, in -current this has all been fixed. E.g., instead of Firefox ESR it comes with the "normal" version of Firefox, giving a lot better compatibility with modern web sites and much better performance. Looking forward to the 15.0 release!

These are just examples where Slackware hasn't been perfect, but then, no other distro is. However, Slackware has been causing less unplanned issues than any other distro I have tried here, and it requires less effort for maintenance than other operating systems. It's hard to explain this in short (or even in a long) forum post, it's just something you will find out over a longer period of time. I recommend you to just try it out, and don't judge to early. Give it (any yourself) some time --- a few months, at least, maybe as secondary system. After that time you will understand much better, what experienced users have said in this thread. If by then you conclude, that Slackware is not for you, it's fine. But from my own experience, Slackware has great benefits that are not totally obvious and that you will notice and learn to appreciate only after some while of using it.
Because almost always it is true that IT JUST WORKS.

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I used to be very fond of Debian. I ran it for years, first Stable (I think I started with Etch) and then Testing. I never had any trouble with it, not even when they switched to systemd. The ability to start small (net-install) and build up your system was one thing that attracted me.

But over the years, I came to yearn for something simpler. For a while LFS served me very well. It was quite possible in those days to create a system that ran basic applications (not LibreOffice obviously!) without too much ancillary software. That just isn't possible any more. You need too much cruft just to do the building. And LFS showed me too that upstream packages were nothing like the fragmented ones that Debian used. I began to wonder what all this extra complexity was for.

So eventually I came to Slackware, which I found to be a very good match for my temperament. What kept me away from it for so long was the mystique that surrounds it, the perception that Slackware is eccentric and definitely for experts only. I don't think this has anything to do with the lack of dependency checking, because you have to know a bit about Slackware before you become aware of this aspect of it. It's a more general perception of a closed shop. If we want the community to grow, I think perhaps we need to tackle that problem.

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