I'd rather have a "toy" distribution too. Distributions like that are fun, exciting to work with, have great communities, and present a more welcoming atmosphere.

There's a damn good reason I don't use anything but Slackware as my primary Linux distribution. Yeah, I mess with LFS when I get the itch to do so, but Slackware it is and always will be.

If that makes it a "toy" OS, just like BSD, then I'll stick to my toys. Toys are fun, invoke imagination, bring joyfulness, and often educational.

Slackware is like my big bucket of Legos I have from my childhood. I learned a lot from my Legos... Slackware too.

Well I know nothing about PAM issues and reasons behind not integrating it in Slackware. As far as I remember PV once criticized dropline gnome due to using PAM. I respect developer's decisions about new technologies as they try to keep Slackware simple, flexible and stable and these are the parameters which have distinguished Slackware from many Linux distros for long years.
Personally I like Willy's work on Cinnamon desktop so much and if someday I need PAM I will use it (didn't try yet but I guess it support fingerprint scanner too). I am sure all knowledgeable slackers in this forum know how to add different technologies to Slackware if they need them without burden on PV and his team to sacrifice Slackware philosophy.

Borrowed this line from dugan's homepage: "This is Slackware. Do anything you want"

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I think the bottom line is it really shouldn't be that difficult for the average Slacker to disable PulseAudio or edit the SlackBuilds and rebuild a few very small packages, get your card using alsa instead of pulse, blacklist in slackpkg, etc. This isn't <insert some GUI based hold your hand distro> and it took me less than fifteen minutes to remove, rebuild and get the sound working with alsa. Some of you should be able to do it in five minutes. I am pulse-free just like in 14.1, mind you I use fluxbox, openbox or some obscure window managers and don't use or install Xfce or KDE.

So strap on a pair, man up, get your hands dirty for a few minutes and stop whinging!


edit addition: Do not remove keybinder if you use Ponce's LXDE. It requires it for the panel (I just installed LXDE for my kids)

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That alone deserves a big "Welcome to LQ"!

(Ahem, and we acknowledge the polite indulgence of the many lady Slackers as we boys do as boys will do!)

Strong with the force young padawan is!

Here's one question that may answer why PAM hasn't been included. Is PAM a hard dependency of any package in the main Slackware tree? No.

Pulse is a required dependency/runtime for BlueZ's audio system.

Now please, either follow the advice and fork Slackware, maintain an SBo ad-on package with complete instructions for system integration, etc. otherwise your efforts are like peddling ice to eskimos.

@astrogeek Thanks for the welcome!! I've been using Slackware since March 1995. I prefer to sit back and read the threads and absorb the knowledge rather than chime in with my unimportant opinion. Pat always puts out a solid release and we're usually able to fix, remove, or add whatever we want to customise Slackware to our liking. That's why I've stuck with it. For some reason today I got irked because it's such a simple fix that takes a minimal amount of time and effort and I see unnecessary whining. And Eric gave an alternative on his blog and this thread to disable it.

For the ladies, I apologise if I appeared not to include you. It was not my intention. I am definitely not PC and come from a time when "man" or "mankind" could refer to men or women or "guys" could used to refer to a mixed group of men and women and not just a group of men. Somehow I think it would sound funny "to strap on a pair and person up" ;-)

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I've been using pulseaudio since 14th Jan'16. I just upgraded it with the last Sunday changelog. It has been doing its job pretty well, just like ALSA did before it: to handle audio through many analog/digital inputs and outputs seen on any modern computer.

Being an hifi audio enthusiast myself, I don't count on my computer systems to provide any sort of audiophile quality stream, so either PA or ALSA are fine enough for my computer audio needs. I tend to believe these are the audio expectations of any user base majority: listen to compressed audio through analog (line out) or digital (e.g. HDMI) outputs, play some games and get input to a voice/video call (mic being the typical example).

Of course, PA poses a challenge for the ones in need of a low latency, near real time system. I also tend to believe that the pro-audio setup is an edge case among the Linux community. Anyway, the people looking for this kind of setup are experienced enough to handle that in Slackware or any other PA based distro out there with things like jackd, ALSA plugins and their friends. Their work and knowledge are huge to improve our daily basis expectations, but their use case aren't.

That being said and after I have read this topic and others related to it, my general feeling about all this can be expressed as:

• PA introduction: an existing functionality (audio from/to bluetooth devices) broke after the new bluetooth server (BlueZ 5). This renders a standard Slackware functionality, available on any modern system with Bluetooh hardware, into an unavailable feature, hence the decision towards PA.
• PAM issue: a central auth layer that was never a functionality on Slackware. People looking for centralized auth should look elsewhere or being able to add the functionality by themselves on their Slackware. By not being a Slackware feature, this is not supported by the Slackware maintainers.
• PA vs PAM: they have nothing to do with each other, except by the fact that some people are trying to push the later using as an excuse the introduction of the prior.
• PAM4Slackware defenders: people looking to be 'one of a kind' among their IT departments and colleagues by playing the victim role to pressure Slackware maintainers to provide PAM as an standard feature. What they really want in the end of the day is to say this out loud: 'Hey! You, bellow the average [put the distro here] admin! I'm better than you because I run Slackware in an enterprise environment.'

I run Slackware on my own cloud enterprise systems. I've been forced to PAM very few times. When I do, I go for another distro. No drama. I don't know if this is to 'SysAdmin'. All that I know is that this has been working with an incredible success rate for ages. Someone may argue: 'but it could work with Slackware if it had PAM.' How, my dear Oompa Loompa? Slackware doesn't have PAM now.

Now I think the time to shut my mouth up for another year has arrived...

EDIT: please note that my understanding is that audio is the key feature of Slackware, while low latency audio is not. This was a side effect of a pure ALSA system, but not something advertised as a feature. As such, PA still provides audio as before, although not being low latency anymore.

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Pat's record speaks for itself. Solid, reliable and stable. As a person who works for a big global company and has to deal with roadblocks due to our various linux distributions being buggy and fragile - Slackware stands out as the one distro that just works.


Thanks, Pat & Team!

4 members found this post helpful.

I love this! Pretty much spot on, another tactic at from sPAMmers (SCAMmers?) at this point: playing the victim card while juxtaposing it with illusory superiority.

Keyboard warring aside, let's just agree that we'll get bacon (in the form of systemd first) before sPAM. /ducks

You do notice the irony of your own statement?

Mods please close this thread it was never anything but trolling and now its just bickering and name calling. Its only doing the community harm at this point.

If there is any doubt this was a troll the fact that the OP has not come pack to post in 6 pages, should prove it.

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Sure I do! IF it was just like you've quoted. That's why I made it complete.

You know what, @kikinovak, the original post version I wrote was:

But I thought it was against LQ rules, so I refrain myself to mention names.

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+1 for this.

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Not too terribly long ago - I found a good deal on a T430 (used). The T400 is still here and in use though :-)

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for me it's OK if you do this,
your over the screen and internet expert analysis tells me how serious I have to take your posts, namely as serious as the quality of your prediction
which then for was about 5 minutes or so