Haven't seen this posted:

Ooops!

https://www.happyassassin.net/2014/1...-21-right-now/

Spin to follow by the now daily flock of seagulls ...

I did not say 'forced.' And other than that nit, of course it's true they are guided to use proprietary tools. It's true and your acknowledgement is not required.

Automatically? No, they are guided that way, by design. I never denied it would be possible to do what you claimed to do here - it's perfectly possible. It is NOT the normal use case, however, it's quite a strange and unusual case, however. You see, Ubuntu's claim to fame is it's GUIfication. Installing Ubuntu and then doing everything by the command line? It's not impossible, and I never said it's impossible. It's highly unusual however, and makes little sense. You sound like a masochist, and one that is rather worked up at the moment. Take a breath, calm down.

Respond to what I say, pro or con, fair enough, but quit putting words in my mouth. A good 90% of your post is getting snipped because it's stupid tiresome BS, attacking me for things I neither said nor implied.

Reading is fundamental. If you cannot understand what I am saying, you should save yourself the embarrassment of replying further.

Without entering the broader debate, I would just say that doing a remote install of Slackware is fairly easy, though it is not a pushbutton solution. All that is required is modifying isolinux's initrd.img to create an installer that doesn't prompt for a keyboard layout*, add it to lilo, and reboot. I have been remote installing Slackware for years.


* In Slackware 14.1, it is also necessary to modify root's password. (this owing to a regression in the Busybox login). Hopefully this won't be necessary in the next release.

Where did I say that anyone would be too incompetent? The fact of the matter is, many more people use Debian/Ubuntu/RHEL/CentOS professionally than Slackware. If you are looking to hire others, they will *already* be familiar with these systems and won't need to learn how to use them. This will likely not be the case with Slackware. Thus, to make it easier for all, it may be wise to use something that any street-hire will be able to pick up and be proficient at without needing to train them on Slackware specifically or increase the 'breaking-in' period. You can bury your head in the sand and pretend that this is an injustice but it is the world we live in. If you have more control over the business then perhaps Slackware could be suitable, but that won't always be the case. (Additionally, you are assuming Slackware is either perfect or clearly better than everything else in every circumstance; Slackware has its flaws as well, and may not *always* be the best choice for every application. I prefer it myself and use it when I can.)
I knew I would see this response before I read it. In an ideal world where all hosts are equal -- they are suitably located, the prices are all equal, the hardware offered is equivalent, the bandwidth is sufficient, etc. -- yes, I would definitely pick the one that offers Slackware. I have yet to see this in the real world, so I have to live with the options available. You will find Slackware available from a remarkably small selection of hosts, severely limiting your options in regards to the other hosting criteria. I can either get the best hardware/bandwidth/etc. for the best price -- OR I can insist on Slackware support and get a worse deal. There is more to think about than JUST the distro, but you can keep pretending that isn't so.

This is far off-topic and I can see that this debate isn't helping anyone so I guess I'll exit stage left.

I would welcome systemd in Slackware and I can't really follow people who claim it would be not a Linux, but Ubuntu (that made Linux much more popular than it has been before) or Windows or whatever. Linux is a Linux and not what someone wants it to be; there is a large community and a plenty of LINUX distros and I see no reason to stay behind and refuse more and more good LINUX software only because it depends on systemd.

You must be new here. :lol:

Not many other Slackware users would agree with you.
Again, it's the same as it ever was. There is supposed to be a lot of good software which depends upon PAM too. The PAM-free alternatives have served Slackware well enough for a very long time... Although word has it that this is might change soon...

My opinion is that Slackware should not try to be like other distributions. It hasn't blindly followed the pack so far. Why start now?

IIRC I'm using Slackware since Slack 12. The main reason I switched to Slackware was its package managing (the packages aren't split into 1000 parts).

Yeah, ok, Slackware shouldn't just follow the mainstream. I'm just afraid that slackware will exclude software like widely used desktop environments (e.g. KDE) because of systemd. The situation can become much more complicated than it was with PAM.

The most people who don't want to support "the exodus" write that they trust PV and therefore they would accept systemd if need be. I only want to say that there are also people, who would not just accept, but welcome it. Although IMHO it isn't very reasonable to avoid PAM so long and waste time on patching software to get rid of some dependencies just because PAM was insecure 100 years ago.

You can't blame Slackware for that.

It would take some getting used to, but at this point I'd rather do without KDE than have to put up with systemd. XFCE works quite well and is complete enough to encourage me to switch.
I fear that you're right.

linux is about thousands of people working on making a good OS
people with different skill sets, stiles, ways of thinking
systemd goes contrary to all that
and why is it like that ties in to why it is compared to windows

you see.. when people yell "UNIX way" they mean the basics of what makes unix unix
separate utilities using separate mechanism to achieve separate things ultimately using the kernel (linux kernel is a copy of the unix kernel)
and it does that by mostly using "files" as simple system interfaces (the "everything is a file" philosophy, expanded upon by plan9 (/proc and such))

systemd, on the other hand, is a collection of programs that are tied together by a object orientated protocol (dbus)
and is going in the realm of "everything is in namespaces" (the kdbus docs imply that)
much like windows
that and the, not so important, fact that systemd configuration files use an INI format



i wouldn't worry much about KDE needing systemd
it needs it now for wayland, as wayland does not have some session related things that X does
that things, that logind provides, i am sure someone will do better (if not it's easy to fake, not that they are complicated)
that and the fact that X isn't going anywhere for at least the next 10 years

Sorry, but I totally fail to see what a bug that occurs when upgrading to the Alpha version of the next Fedora release (which by the way is expected to have bugs) has to do with this topic.

I'm regularly confronted with this problem, since I work as a Linux trainer for various clients. While it's true that many more people use Debian/Ubuntu/RHEL/CentOS professionally than Slackware, popularity has always been a poor indicator of quality. Charles Mingus has always had a more limited crowd of followers than, say, Britney Spears. But that doesn't mean his music sucks.

You speak of "the world we live in". I understand this, but don't forget that the world we live in is also modeled by all of us, including you and me. When I teach my students the inner workings of a Linux system over a period of two to four months, I almost exclusively rely on Slackware from the basics to the more complex configurations like web/file/mail/proxy servers. The idea is this: if they can figure it out on Slackware, they will be able to figure it out on Debian/Ubuntu/RHEL/CentOS, since these four all have excellent online documentation. What they will have acquired is a special mindset, a "Linux admin thinking" sort of thing

After my studies, I worked two years as a motorbike courier and got to drive all possible brands of motorbikes under the sun: Transalp, Africa Twin, VFR 750, CBR 900, CX 500, XR 600, R100, K100, everything from old to new to street bike to sports bike to enduro. I do have my favourite in the lot (the BMW R100R), but knowing how to drive them all is the best lesson to be proficient on the brand you prefer.

Cheers,

Niki

There will be no "mass exodus" from Slackware. Real slackers will slack till death. If PV tells me that systemd will be good for slackware, I will believe him. He is the creator and the man in charge of this great distribution, along with a very competent crew. So, I am not worried about it.

We also have dconf and xfconf doing basically the same thing. And none of them uses plain text files. And the chance is that all the three of them run at the same time. This definitely isn't the "Unix way".

What is exactly the problem with the namespaces and object oriented protocols.
And what is exactly the problem with the plain text human readable INI file.

And what exactly a "good OS" means.

Cheers

Is it a joke? There is also a graphical environment just like in Windows, file managers just like in Windows, audio players just like in Windows, text and graphic editors just like in Windows. Why is it bad, that something is "similar to Windows", is it automatically bad, just evil like systemd itself? Why should anyone use plain text files for that if they are difficult and slow to parse.. The data now are more complex, you can't do everything with methods, that are 30 years old. It is very strange understanding of a "Unix-way". Btw Lennart mentioned on some forum, that systemd makes the Linux much more unix-like than before since the most Unix-like systems (solaris, FreeBSD) don't have something like distributions and have less freedom, give less options than Linux does (hopefully I got right, what he's meant). True Unix philosophy: make everything difficult, unusable, old-fashioned ... :D

How was your flight? ;) It relates a little bit more than replying to my post just to say that it doesn't relate.