Slackware for desktop and server needs
 

Hi everybody. Newbie's here. I'm a bit tired of what I see in ubuntu, fedora, arch, etc. I mean there so much ppls effort in making these distros... overcomplicated. I feel myself sitting on a black box without any clue what could happen next. That's just my two cents about what's going on in gnu/linux world.
It's time for me to have a taste of Slackware. However I'm not sure if it worthy to try. Mostly due to lack of experience with such distros. My usual cases are: desktop (some gaming, some graphics, a lot of office work like browsing and text editing in LO, some tv shows) and server (syncthing relay, openvpn server, maybe nextcloud server in future).
I've just looked at the list of packages in official repository and got a question. From what I can see there are up to 20 programs I've used to use on daily basis that are not a part of official Slackware or alienbob public repository. It's kind of a strange for me that Slackware in 2020 doesn't have a decent video player, office suite, etc. So it's up to me now to bring what I want.
Any advices for a new user? I'll appreciate any advices, especialy about how to manage remote Slackware server (from installation to maintaining). Also I'm interested in making a desktop gaming platform with steam and proton. Cheers

Welcome to the Slackware forum of LinuxQuestions.org yohohoho.
You'll find a good starting point to find answers to your questions here: https://docs.slackware.com/

Share that list of programs you seem to miss. Slackware is a distro with a dedicated core set and a lot of choice in cummunity packages.

Welcome to LQ!! As Alien Bob suggested it is a good plan to read the ample, available documentation about Slackware before you do your first installation.
You may wish to try out Slackware in a virtual machine before committing to erasing your hard drive. Have a lot of fun. We're here to help.

Let's see... I miss libreoffice (I've found it in your public repository, thanks for binary version!), mpv, syncthing, perl exiftool, redshift, isync, keepassxc, p7zip, unrar, youtube-dl, mu, claws-mail/sylpheed, dmenu, fzf, librecad, inkscape and some other stuff + dependencies. Also thanks for the link. Gonna research this later.

One more question that bothers me so much. Is it real when one (?) person maintain a distro? AFAIK mr. Valkerding is over 50.

Hi yohohoho! Welcome to LQ and Slackware!

As for the "missing" 20 programs that are "missing". Well you mentioned 2.

alienbob repo do have VLC and LibreOffice
Or do you use something else for both/either of these?

Compared to *buntu, Slackware is different in many ways. Out of the box, it's not just as easy as typing a command for installing everything not included by default. You might have to build these packages including their dependencies on your own, or use repositories like alienbob's to download and install some of these packages already made for you.

To find buildscripts for packages missing after installing Slackware, you can use slackbuilds.org
(I suggest that you check that site out for all your missing packages. I'm pretty sure you'll find, if not all, the most of them there).
Still missing something? Ask for help on here, we're a friendly bunch of people here who are willing to help.

And if you should want to build VLC on your own, the slackbuild is found on slackbuilds.org (same with Libreoffice and a long list of other office programs/suites)

Edit:
Due to the reply later on...
I should've edited this post earlier, and mention that I was slow typing (no one had replied when I started to type the above)...

I'm subsribing to the topic. I anticipate some promising fun here.

Posts like this always make me laugh:
this is linux for fsck sake!
tired of specific distro? well some are a bit more conservative in terms of latest hardware adaptation (Slackware current is better in this respect than 14.2) and addition of new tools and some are more cutting edge, but ultimately one can build own tools from the sources and there is no real difference or get distro that will have specific tools ready to use.
Openvpn? I have it instaled on FreeBSD, OpenIndiana, Slackware, MXLinux, ArcoLinux and Funtoo and I don't see much of the difference.
Stability?
In my experience Slack, MXLinux, BSDs and OpenIndiana are equally stable.
Desktop experience? You just need to try. Some tools/facilities may be not available for Slack, but you can compile them from the source.
I don't remember a distro without Libreoffice (except some specialized flavors), although I am not certain about CRUX or Obarun (I used them some time ago) and probably few small other distros, still get sources and install them.

Next, you will try Slackware and possibly complain why Mate is not available instead of Plasma (seriously you can find that stupid tread here) or why installer can't do this or that (equally stupid).
there are so many distros out there and they are in fact so easy to install that the best way to find what you like is to install try and accept or reject.

I can understand that someone installed Slack and there is a need for help (and here you can get really good help), but being "tired" of what you see not so much.

In fact what do you see that make you tired?

OP came into the forum seeking help and advice. Please take your ego and uppity attitude elsewhere.

OP, while Slackware comes with a lot of software, compared to the bigger distros the package selection is much less. There are are some trusted third party repos to help fill the void, some of which have been mentioned already.

The majority of additional software is found at slackbuilds.org. Likely you'll find the software you seek. The caveat is you have to learn how to compile the packages with each respective build script as well as learn about package dependencies. There are a handful of tools that help find all dependencies.

A nominally more newbie friendly introduction to Slackware is the Salix distro. That distro includes some GUI admin tools and dependency checking with packages. There is no need to compile packages.

Welcome to the Slackware world. I've been using Slackware for more that 15 years. I understand your concerns about other distros. Been there done that. I hope you have fun too.

All those listed are available @ https://slackbuilds.org. Check https://sbopkg.org/ to ease building and installing packages with the help of the included sqg to sort dependencies.

Oh and for your information I maintain Slint, a distribution based on Slackware (see my sig) and am currently 71. So unless Patrick Volkerding decides to retire early you can count on 20+ years of maintenance of Slackware ;)

When checking slackbuilds.org, don't forget to check sbopkg (and sqg) as well on github unless you are masochist enough to manually track down and download dependencies :)

I call shenanigans.

This is not about my ego.


you can try every distro forum and the advice will be exactly the same. There is absolutely nothing specific in the first post that would provoke reasonable answer pointing specifically to Slack, Gentoo or whatever. In fact this is a good question for
the

Being "tired" of Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch means just nothing, it is so general and undefined. Not surprisingly, suggestions will be as general (and they are). To the point that one can point to any distro (including Fedora, Ubuntu Arch..).

They're on SBo. Easiest is to install/use sbotools (either 14.2 or -current). Documentation is here.

Haha, yep.