Slackware 13.1 - first impressions
 

My goodness - I'm very, very impressed! Everything about it seems sharper, cleaner, better defined. Even KDE, towards which I have held an irrational hatred for many years, is most impressive. Fonts seem much better by default.

I want to say a huge thank you to all involved in this distro. Time for me to put my hand in my pocket as well I think!

:)

Nice =)

Thanks for the feedback.

I think one of the greatest things that's being said about it is........nothing. Short of me doing half an upgrade and posting after an hour of trying to figure out what the probelm was when I should have waited 1.5 hours :D the forum is SILENT about problems. Out of the box it is a great experience.

My hat's off to the whole team!

i continue to look on slack 13.1 on eeepc 900,but at this time i see -kde is a bit better than in version 13.0 ( but, in general, not as close to old kde from 12.2 - in old times, slackware be in more conservative, and not introduce that buggy and green things, imho...).
on other hand - ethernet and wifi now work out of the box.
mc looks better, when you copying files with it.

minuses - in distro (out of the box) not contain a ebook reader ( like FBreader, or kbookreader or qbookshell or so), new kde not contain quickshow ( i very like it - in all old kde this is a default jpg and so, viever - very ok, imho).
not contain openoffice...
games, like freeciv, rocks n diamonds and so.
in all that aspects ( fully working office desktop / gamestation for kids from box) a mandriva is better, imho.
whats me like in this release -out of the box contains kdeedu, mplayer, xmms.

Slackware includes at least 3 pdf readers.
KDE's defaults okular, which is much more than a pdf reader as can handle any format out there, xpdf,as well as the poppler libs if you are feeling adventurous.

The replacement for Kuickshow is Gwenview.

I personally like Ristretto, Mirage and Geeqie better though.

wisedraco, with slackware, besides having the free (and tested) things we need for everyday use, they offer us a rock-solid base for customizations.
you can build yourself what you need pretty easily using slackbuilds.org repository (there are also unofficial repositories of pre-built additional stuff that can be added faster, one of the biggest is alien bob's).
there are many tools that help you achieve that: the one I choose is sbopkg, building myself 269 packages in one shot :)
so, with not much sweating, I managed to add what I need for my installs (mainly multimedia apps and codecs, but also games :D ).

I think the intention is to leave to the user to choose what to have on his pc and what not, but with consciousness of what he is doing (remember that slackware has no dependencies tracking).
I don't think that everybody actually uses *all* the apps I chosen for myself (I add nearly 1 Gb of additional packages to my 13.1s)... but I do.
For example I use also alien bob's vlc but still because I need it, others may not have such needs (openoffice is another example of that).

and also I can understand that it's better to maintan a smaller but pristine distribution with trusted software than add tons of stuff that one day works and the next may not (and that has to be tested in either case).

I have no first impressions for slackware 13.1. I already see the regular improvements on -current and I love the bluetooth thing in slack finally.

I just installed 13.1 on my netbook and all I can say is WOW!. This is a VERY nice release, and the inclusion of blueman is a huge step forward.

Slackware 13.1 is absolutely First Rate! I've done two installs of 13.1 and they have proceeded very smoothly. No glitches evident. :)
Two more stations to upgrade....fun!

13.1 will go down in history as one of the best releases ever, no doubt about it (IMHO, of course :) ) , but I was a bit disappointed that Alien Bob's "True Multilib" files were not included, at least in /extra (for Slackware64).

Many Thanks to Mr. V. and the entire Slackware development team!
:hattip:

Hi,

I won't speak for Eric (aka Alien_Bob) but I think that to not include 'multilib' in '/extra' won't be a disadvantage to the average user. Eric does a great job on the blog and by his changing things on a quick basis provides us the ability to have a stable x86_64 multilib system experience. Some people like to keep a clean or pure system therefore a choice to either 'multilib' or not. I have each but on different systems!

I can say that 'Slackware 13.1 Stable' is a great release.

:hattip:

Not that I disagree, but it would be nice to have everything in "one place," e.g., in /extra on the DVD, so one doesn't have to bounce around the 'Net looking for what he needs.
:)

Unfortunately my installation stalled five times as it failed to read the disc,I completed the install and it did boot up to a desktop but the mouse and keyboard were dead...so I am burning a new one nice and slow and I feel really optimistic that I will soon have a x86_64 working Slack 13.1 system... I hope. !

ps I don,t bother with the MD5sum until this sort of thing happens which is not very often. LOL

If the same thing happens with the new burn, make sure to check your CD/DVD drive to make sure it is not going.