On the plus side (I think), it appears that Mr. Volkerding will easily outlive his user base, given the current numbers. :D

Good one!
:D

They've heard Billy Milano shouting at them, so they're shouting back.

Hi,

I have to say, Lysander666, thank you very much for this great thread. There are many academics out there using Linux machines, especially in STEM fields, where HPC is becoming more and more essential to do our work. 99% of servers do run Linux.

I am currently a PhD student in Physics. I specialise in cosmology and radio astronomy. We have a project here where we are building a radio interferometer with hundreds of antennas. With hundreds of analogue inputs, the signal processing and imaging becomes an HPC problem and I am currently developing software for DSP and radio interferometric imaging on GPUs. The digital back-end is actually a hybrid FPGA-GPU system.

Slackware is central in the development. For example, if we didn't have Slackware it would have been difficult to make the GPU work. With Slackware, it was easy to change the kernel to a newer version, install the proper driver and the appropriate version of CUDA by tweaking the SlackBuilds scripts. Also, Slackware comes with many many libraries, so I have support for all sorts of stuff like FFT libraries, different compilers and support for network programming.

One very important aspect is the way Slackware is. Slackware uses lots of scripts and is very simple. This forces the user to dig deep and learn the system in order to administrate it properly. Being a Slackware user since 2013, I have learnt how a GNU/Linux system works. Knowing the system very well is a huge advantage. I can sort out issues quite quickly. Understanding how stuff works brings efficiency in my everyday work. It surely helps when you are under lots of stress and doing a PhD.

Finally, Slackware is very very very very stable. I am probably biased, but I must say, Slackware is the best. As people on LQ usually say, "Rock Solid". I must say, "Diamond Solid". The thing just works. It is comforting to know that your Linux machine will not give up on you. That's a nice feeling to have when working under pressure.

So, yeah. Slackware is being used to do Cosmology, Astronomy and Astrophysics, and everything is working just fine. :)

Cheers.

I'm trying current on a laptop for driver reasons and to see what is coming along. A full install comes with a good chunk of texlive 2018 to replace the xetex package found on 14.2. pdflatex is there but not all the fancier style packages.

I may be preaching to the converted but you can put the whole of texlive 2018 on 14.2 (or 14.1) by removepkgeing the xetex package, downloading the texlive iso, burning it to a DVD (or just mounting it locally I suppose) and then using texlive's own installer, and then adding the path to the texlive binaries to your .profile. See

https://tug.org/texlive/quickinstall.html

I'm not an academic and I'm just dabbling with TikZ for mathematical diagrams. That in turn needs the 'standalone' style package which in turn needs... and so on. So I just install the whole kitchen sink, about 5Gb of hard drive space. I've 'standardised' on texlive 2018 for all the machines I use so no annoying incompatibilities.

Nice thread. Not metal but fun...

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCru...gEG8VO8xtBHFuQ

As for the age, I'm "four dozens" now, i.e., 48 years old. Turning 49 in September, hopefully. Began to dabble in Slackware in 2001, began to use it exclusively as my Linux distro in 2002-2003; it was about the 9.x version with hotplug, I think. I remember reading Pat's release notes/announcements where he stated that hotplug was a huge, huge change and it was: it paved the way for me to become a full Slackware user.

aragorn2101 - fascinating post. It's great to know that Slackware is instrumental to your research, as well as making it more efficient.

Oh, that puzzle had barely been up, in its current form, for a few hours. I didn't expect anyone to mention it, let alone crack it, for a good while. Congratulations, I'll have to get to work on another soon.

No, Metal music is not officially approved in Iran and they are not many metal fans here. Today, teenagers mostly listen to hip-hop and metal community is very small and underground.

Nightwish was a great band until Tarja Turunen left the group. Now she has her own band.

I wrote my M.A. thesis, a book and several published articles using Slackware during my studies (~10 years ago now). I was a heavy user of Tellico as an information management tool at the time, using it to track primary sources and keep transliterations and translations of them as I did my research. I'm no longer in academia but have the occasional related side-project and it's all done on Slackware.

As for metal in the Middle East, not really my thing, but I've spent more than a few nights at Caravan in Beyoğlu, Istanbul, which is a local haunt for metal enthusiasts.

My last published paper was written in Lyx using bibtex for references handled using JabRef and a graphic produced using gimp.
As there are Windows versions of Lyx and JabRef, then I could seamlessly transfer between versions produced under Linux and under Windows.
I abhor Microsoft Word. (Reference handling is hell and prone to breakage as well as seemingly endless futzing with table layout amongst another annoyances)
I also abhor Microsoft PowerPoint, but it is the de facto standard presentations for all recent conferences that I have attended.

Same here, but usually I get away with Beamer by giving them a PDF. If the staff is too clueless, I put it into presentation mode myself.

Also being the first Linux in space should count for something. :)

cool thread. not in acedamia but I studied networking and programming under 20 years ago. used slackware for learning purposes and had a apache server running. used a slackware box for router before the days of router in box when broadband cable internet just came out.

love slackware been using it for nearly 20 years, hoping for another 20 years. its solid OS.

Interesting read on this thread so far, I guess at 30 I'm on the lower age bracket of slackware users which was a little surprising.

I've been working as a college instructor teaching electrical theory for the last 6 years. When I started the college provided me with a Windows laptop and I had a Macbook Pro at home. I found writing technical documents in Word and drawing schematics in Visio to be a treacherous process with constant formatting problems, and the lack of visio support on other operating systems was limiting in where I could work.

I searched for a better software solution that worked cross-platform and found LaTeX and the packages in the CTAN archive fit perfectly. When my Macbook crapped out a year after warranty coverage I looked into finding a laptop that could support Linux and bought a Dell XPS 13 9350 (I was tired of apple products and their business model). As soon as the new laptop arrived I removed windows and installed slackware 14.2. I had been using slackware since version 12.0 on a server at home so I was most familiar with it. Once slackware current was packaging texlive and ffmpeg I also switched to tracking current and running ktown.

All my documents are now written with slackware's included texlive and texlive-extra from slackbuilds. The circuitikz, pgfplots, beamer, and exam packages make beautiful documents and I never have the random formatting breakage that I had before. The only downside is when I have to share documents with coworkers and they want a Word document instead of a PDF file. I've also wrote a few test generator scripts that pull questions out of a database and use latex to generate PDF documents to save time on writing different test versions manually.

Slackware has made my work much easier in the long run and I won't be looking back.

Now THIS is a great idea. Thanks!! :D