Well as someone that uses Slackware and Salix on all of our office desktops and laptops, which also runs our website and online store...I would say that Slackware is just fine for business. Alot of the so called business IT requirements are (IMO) just marketing and advertising by the big corps. that make money selling those "solutions".

Similar to RedHat and others making their money off support, its in their self interest to put out releases that require support, but that's just my crazy tin foil opinion, and YMMV.

PS: of course home boxes are Slackware/Salix as well.

5 members found this post helpful.

As far as I know, they sell support contracts, not support per-issue. So yes, the systems require support (like any computer system would), but they are not designed to break, if that's what you are suggesting.

like I said tin foil hats and all....

Its a bit like the hamster on the wheel, is his relentless running moving the wheel or is the wheel moving his little legs. Systems that offer support contracts will as experience shows, often need more support. I also remember the days when companies would provide their own support (in house) but that's another discussion for another thread.

1 members found this post helpful.

It seems, https://wiki.debian.org/LTS claims 5 years support. I have one old vps with debian-wheezy (which was released in 2013), it receives security updates regularly.

I have use packages from there when I'm not able to build my own. And then you have packages that some might use that don't exist in any of the repositories.

Here is what I think Slackware can improve, instead of having multiple repositories, why not just have one dedicated one?
You have ponce, alien bob, MLED, Slackonly etc... A lot of the packages overlap and some are outdated. You have a couple guys focus only on 32bit, a couple guys focus only on 64bit, a couple guys focus only on maintaining and updating the sources for the 32/64 bit builders. Upload it, script detects what you have already present, update, reboot system, go on about life and enjoy Slackware. It's called a team. No big I and small u, just a kick-ass linux distro.

Using Slackware? If yes, would you please elaborate a bit?

Would you please provide some details how Slackware is being used?

Is this a personal or business preference? Would you please provide some details why?

Would you please provide some details? A simple one-liner what you do and how your computer interfaces with the company network/systems.

LXC containers?

I would like to learn more!

Sure. I'm a software engineer for a telecommunications company. My primary job is the maintenance and enhancement of our E911 event handling / call routing automation. I also automate processing of our international rate deck, develop centralized structured logging software, and various minor stuff like dashboard report generation.

My desktop talks to our company infrastructure via ssh, email (imaps via Mutt) and the browser (Pale Moon).

I give my updated ssh public key to our chief sysadmin and he has a script which pushes it everywhere. I do most of my work from shell prompts on various systems (database servers, dev box, app servers, web servers, metaswitch, central log server).

Through the browser I can access Nagios, various dashboard reports, JIRA, Redmine, Confluence, HipChat, shared administrative documents (like the employee directory, insurance plans, performance review forms, etc) and the SaaSHR website (for requesting PTO and tracking my compensation).

It's all fairly straightforward and vanilla. I use Slackware because it's what I'm most comfortable and familiar with, and everything jfw.

1 members found this post helpful.

yes

here is a documented slackware installation via pxe
http://alien.slackbook.org/dokuwiki/...=slackware:pxe

here is another example with a pxe menu with multiple choices
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PXEInstallMultiDistro

you can also, via the dhcp server, send specific things to your machines booting via ethernet, discriminating on their MAC address: this way you can make an operating system image and send it to diskless hosts.
in our environment I used this to send them a thin client to connect to a terminal server.

Happily using Slackware for years now at my job:
- several Samba fileservers for our users
- one firewall/Nat/gateway box for our deployment lab (to shield it from the company network): provides a.o DNS/DHCP/NTP for pc's on the internal network
- application/webserver : Owncloud + Roundcube webmail (for limited number of internal users)
- backup server (mostly rsync)
- Nagios monitoring system
- imaging/deployment server (basically an FTP + Samba server, and using Clonezilla live CD/USB stick on the clients)
- and of course Slackware on my company laptop (mostly used to rdp into the Windows machines, and ssh into the Linux servers)
Some of these machines are VM's on a Proxmox server, others are physical computers.
So, yes Slackware is certainly usefull in a busisness enviroment .

1 members found this post helpful.

Wow .. You're absolutely right. This is a hugely salient point, and one I've been overlooking. Thanks for putting it on my radar.

An "Enterprise Slackware" would need to pull a lot of packages from sbo into the set of officially supported packages.

sbo is great, I like and use it, but in some aspects no business ready, for example , their Qt policy, that does not exists, puts you on some random meanwhile maybe even unsupported Qt package, 5.7.2, which is a intermediate developer version.
LTS is 5.6.x and 5.9.x
of course the LTS is a 'new' concept for Qt 5 series, but ignoring it is not good.
who knows what other software follows the same release strategy, that some maintainer picks some version randomly, where random is defined sometimes largely by understanding about the software beyond of successful compiling and packaging it.

Slackware is "Ham" (amateur) Radio, compared to iPhone.
The 1% like me, would never consider an iPhone, but might be a ham & love it.
The 99% I don't "fit" with, live inside FaceBook (&can't fathom my happy world)

Maybe. Sort-of. FWIW. Each to their own

Yes! It's so disappointing that a community of volunteers should fail to do what commercial businesses would want them to do for free.

10 members found this post helpful.

Yeah, man! Volunteers good, filthy greedy companies bad! Burn them all, man!

PS. I ask everyone else to excuse my little Che Guevara moment, but LQ never stop to amaze me...

noone said or implied that, so stop twisting other users' words. SBo is just a community effort to do something useful for others. For free. To my knowledge none of the maintainers or core team has any financial profit out of it.