Slackware wasn't the first Linux distro, but it's the oldest still alive and kicking

This week the Slackware Linux project is celebrating its 30th anniversary. It is the oldest Linux distribution that is still in active maintenance and development. Version 1.0 of Slackware was announced on the July 16, 1993, and project lead Patrick Volkerding, who still maintains the distribution today, celebrated with a …

[MyffyW]

Happy Birthday (Happy Birthday-yay-yay)

Ridiculously fond memories of running Slackware for the first time in autumn of 1997 when I should have been planning an NT4 migration. Got round to the NT4 migration between learning about Linux, XFree86 and all the GNU bells and whistles.

[Ozan]

Re: Happy Birthday (Happy Birthday-yay-yay)

Still using Slackware after all those years. It's like habit I can't shake off by now. I can't use anything else after 20 years on Slack :D

[Paul Kinsler]

Re: It's like habit I can't shake off by now. I can't use anything else after 20 years on Slack :D

Well, me too. I started with Slackware because that's the Linux I'd seen Bruce W using, and at that time (maybe 1993/4) there weren't a lot of alternatives.I think maybe I didn't get round to my own from-scratch install until '95-ish though...

[MichaelGordon]

Re: Happy Birthday (Happy Birthday-yay-yay)

Exactly. I've tried many other Linux distributions through work and other sources, but all my personal machines are Slackware and have been since Slackware's early days. Slackware just gives me far, far fewer "What the hell were they thinking?" moments than any other distro I've used, and avoids the layer and layers of crap between me and what's actually going on that other distros seem so keen on. Take networking for example: on Slackware I edit /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf and either fill in the IP addrfess, gateway, etc. or set USE_DHCP. That's it; no netplan configuration that gets handed to NetworkManager or systemd-networkd, no multiple layers of scripts, etc. The fact that Slackware hasn't been infected with systemd is a very nice feature as well.

[davidlars]

Re: Happy Birthday (Happy Birthday-yay-yay)

That part about not obfuscating networking configuration might actually be reason enough to try Slackware.

It was the first Linux I saw someone using but I wasn't ready to learn anything other than DOS/Windows in elementary school sadly.

It was nice to learn that this is a modern distro in many ways that tries to automate some churn away. I did try Arch briefly but landed on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed (also a rolling distro like Arch) for a chance to learn something a little different since running Ubuntu and it's derivatives all these years.

[Pascal Monett]

"went into beta in 2021 and was released early last year"

Oh my God ! Hey ! Borkzilla ! Are you listening ?

Maybe if you did your shit right, you wouldn't be so worried about making your shit shine.

After all, you're no longer in competition with Apple, now are you ?

[Lennart Sorensen]

Oh yes I remember SLS (installed it in 1992 I think it was, back when the kernel version was 0.97patchlevel who knows what) and then later slackware which did improve a bit on SLS but not a hell of a lot. Eventually found redhat and realized you could do package management much better than SLS (and hence slackware) had done and stuck with that until the bugs drove me nuts and I switched to Debian which actually had even better package design and management than redhat, and haven't found anything better yet so that's what I am sticking with for now. I never could understand why anyone would enjoy putting up with the pathetic design of slackware (or any of the BSDs for that matter, that user space and packaging system is just horrible to use).

At least we have choices.

And I do use systemd and want to use it these days because it turns out it really is a much better way to handle init even if it is totally different than what we had before. It actually solved problems the other init systems never could because they were all that sad unfortunately.

[jake]

"it turns out it really is a much better way to handle init"

As a UNIX/BSD/un*x systems administrator these last several decades, I strongly disagree.

But follow your bliss. Who am I to tell you what to do?

[Liam Proven]

> But follow your bliss. Who am I to tell you what to do?

This is the way of Slack. J R "Bob" Dobbs would approve, I feel.

[DJV]

1996

That was the year I first tried Slackware - I downloaded and popped it onto what seemed like an endless number of floppy disks and, without permission from my manager, partitioned my work PC to dual-boot it. It all worked and I didn't blow the Windows install up, either - fun times!

Now waiting for "jake" to (endlessly - ha ha) comment here on his favourite flavour of Linux!

[jake]

Re: 1996

Not endlessly. Just a few pointers.

Have a beer :-)

[DJV]

Re: 1996

Hi Jake - I knew you wouldn't be able to resist! ;)

[Joe 59]

Re: 1996

For me, I know it was 1994 or 5 <snip far too much information for public consumption about a telco and deregulation and a pervert of a VP who thought F:\Public was to be taken literally>

I downloaded a copy and wrote them to floppies and borrowed a dedicated 486 PC to install it on from a phone company I worked for as a junior dipshit. A previous admin had installed it on a PC to use as a router/firewall/gateway with basic IP Forwarding. For some reason, he didn't want the network team to use a router to reach the outside world, so he stuck a Linux box in front of it, internet on eth0, LAN on eth1. He got fired. I got put in the hot seat. I got fired. We all had a good laugh.

[keithpeter]

readmes

1st image caption: "You can always just Google what to do next". I mean you could also choose to skim the READMEs that come on the installer? Example...

https://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-15.0/Slackware-HOWTO

The KDE desktop option on Slackware 15 includes a lot of applications such as Krita, Kdenlive (video editor) and such. Weighs in at about 1.5Gb so if you don't use KDE not installing that package set could cut the installation size down a bit.

There is a live iso available to try as well produced by AlienBob. Google slackware64-live-15.0.iso for mirrors near you (not on the Slackware mirrors as it is independent).

Icon: obviously

[Liam Proven]

Re: readmes

[Author here]

> Weighs in at about 1.5Gb

I noticed!

When I installed it, I unticked the KDE box. Unfortunately, while I was updating it, the `slackpkg install-new` command sucked in all of KDE, which left about 700 MB of my root partition free.

[keithpeter]

Re: readmes

Aha, did you read about the slackpkg blacklist?

/etc/slackpkg/blacklist

Edit as route and add

kde/

(for Slackware 15) on a line at the end. Then KDE won't get picked up when you run 'install-new'

There are a few things like this that people need to find out about. The point is these things don't change a lot from version to version. (One of the things that did change with Slackware 15 was the wildcard format for the blacklist tbf)

The other thing people might want to know about is changing the permissions of the scripts in /etc/rc.d to enable various services like cups. And /etc/profile.d for things like java paths if java gets installed. Generally pretty bsd-like as that was probably the most available model back in 1993.

[jake]

Re: readmes

Slack's init is kind of an amalgamation of BSD and SysV. Sort of. If you squint.

It is fairly easy to make it a pure SysV or a pure BSD, but I just leave it as volkerdi intended. It has worked the last 30 years, so why change it now?

[jake]

Re: readmes

Yes, it's a big "full" install. But with today's laptops having upwards of a TB, is it really?

Once you've been running it for a while, it's easy enough to build your own install script. Probably not what most people are wanting to hear (thinking is hard for most people), but with Slackware customization is part of the point. Once you've learned to make it yours, the entire OS blissfully slips into the background, allowing your to use your computer for whatever you need/want to use your computer for. It's no longer about admining the box for admining's sake.

[Liam Proven]

Re: readmes

[Author here]

> you could also choose to skim the READMEs

Well, yes, true. What I was in fact alluding to was that when I first tried to install Slackware, I only had the one PC, and although I did have an Internet connection, it's pretty much only did CIX for email and I didn't have a web browser, or indeed PPP. I didn't have any other machine to look at any accompanying documentation on, and while there was the World Wide Web, Google didn't exist yet. When I needed to look up kernel parameters... There wasn't really anywhere.

That's the point that I was trying to make: what stopped me back then would be extremely unlikely to stop anybody now.

[jake]

Re: readmes

"When I needed to look up kernel parameters... There wasn't really anywhere."

I emailed Linus and asked. He got back to me with exactly what I needed in about ten minutes.

The world was a very small place back then. Sometimes I miss it.

[jake]

Re: readmes

AlienBob (Eric Hameleers) is as official as anybody in the Slackware world. You can trust his stuff.

http://www.slackware.com/~alien/

[Steve Davies 3]

Thanks for the memories

Slackware 1.1 as given away on the front of a UK PC Mag was my introduction to Linux. I was already experienced with Unix/Ultrix/OSF.1 so it was not that much of a shock.

It was great to ditch DOS and Windows 3.1 (or some version like that).

LILO was a PITA but otherwise, all was good.

[Liam Proven]

Re: Thanks for the memories

[Author here]

> as given away on the front of a UK PC Mag was my introduction to Linux

I am very curious: *which* UK PC mag?

I ask, because I have a personal involvement in this. When I said that the first distro that I tried was Lasermoon Linux/FT, that was from a Computer Shopper UK cover CD. And I was the first person at the publisher to actually try to install the thing — I know this because I went downstairs to their floor in Dennis Publishing's building and asked. At that time, I worked on PC Pro, who were a couple of floors up from Computer Shopper.

Nobody on the magazine had actually tried the disc. Their Linux correspondent hadn't tried it, because that was Charlie Stross, now a famous SF writer, and he lived too far away — he was up in Edinburgh. He is still a mate of mine from those days, and I've stayed at his place a few times.

A couple of years later, as a freelancer, I coordinated putting together a very cutdown version of SUSE Linux for a cover CD on PC Pro.

As far as I knew at the time, that Lasermoon CD was the first one on any British magazine, and I think that mine was only the second.

So if somebody else had put Slackware on a CD before that, I'm very curious to know who that was and when.

[Steve Davies 3]

Re: Thanks for the memories

I can't remember what mag it was sorry. Far too long ago I'm afraid.

I did come back from a business visit to the US and visiting a shop just off I-495 in MA with a couple of CD's of Linux software. Those were the days of dependency hell and getting anything to work via very dodgy modem support was not fun but I battled through.

[fifemacman]

Re: Thanks for the memories

PC Pro? I remember installing SuSE Linux 5.2 from a CD on the cover of PC Plus in 1998

[Liam Proven]

Re: Thanks for the memories

[Author here]

> PC Pro? I remember installing SuSE Linux 5.2 from a CD on the cover of PC Plus in 1998

Yes, that's the one I helped them build. It accompanied my 2-part "Linux Masterclass" in the magazine.

[AJ MacLeod]

Re: Thanks for the memories

That was the first distro I installed too, never looked back. I'd been driven to desperation by the awful lack of stability of Windows 95 and considering what to replace it with; plain old DOS was actually a serious contender, as was OS/2 but I'd been reading up on Linux for a few months and that cover CD was the impetus I needed.

I probably did the install about ten times before I finally got a working X config (not having a clue about Linux I didn't know any other way of getting back to the configuration menu!) What a world of possibilities opened up once it was up and running though, and I actually ended up with both a prize at university and shortly afterwards a job there largely thanks to being able to transfer my new-found knowledge straight to the SUN systems used for CFD.

I suppose is "thanks" is in order!

(Personally I've never liked the Slackware experience and these days use Gentoo / Alpine / Void / CentOS (Rocky) / Debian depending on circumstances, but happy to see it still alive and kicking as a choice for others.)

[Vincent van Gopher]

Re: Thanks for the memories

Hi Liam

I have here, in front of me right now, the February 1996 CD from PCW (Personal Computer World) magazine. This was the UK edition, in case there were others. Slackware was my first foray in to the Linux World, I now use Mint 99.999% of the time - sometimes more :)

The description on the CD is 'Slackware Professional Linux (shareware version of Unix)'.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Thanks for the memories

>LILO was a PITA but otherwise, all was good.

At least it was comprehensible - compare to EUFI that needs a Shaman, 2 Rabbis and the ghost of Aleister Crowley to understand

The dos-box config menu at least fits on a terminal screen, unlike certain enterprise Linux's that require a 4K monitor to be able to click the OK box at the bottom

[Liam Proven]

Re: Thanks for the memories

[Author here]

> At least it was comprehensible - compare to EUFI

Huh?

LILO is a bootloader, comparable to GRUB, syslinux or systemd-boot.

UEFI (not "EUFI") is a kind of system firmware, comparable to a BIOS or coreboot.

You are comparing apples and (rather than oranges) Mozart's piano concertos.

[rajivdx]

Re: Thanks for the memories

Haha! You knew you were in trouble if LILO got stuck at 'LI'...

[jake]

Re: Thanks for the memories

You also knew you were in trouble if lilo got stuck at LILO...

[jake]

Re: Thanks for the memories

"LILO was a PITA"

Really? I've always kinda liked LILO.

[MichaelGordon]

Re: Thanks for the memories

I like LILO as well - it's much simpler than GRUB and can load the kernel/initrd from any filesystem as it uses disk blocks to find them, compared to GRUB requirement for them to be on a filesystem type it understands.The only drawback of using disk blocks is that you have to remember to rerun it after a kernel update as the new kernel is almost certainly not going to be on the same blocks as the old one.

[Nate Amsden]

Slackware 3 was my first distro

I picked Slackware over Red Hat at the time specifically because I expected it to be more difficult to use (not having RPMs mainly), most other folks at the time were going with Red Hat.

I probably even went more hard core down the hard to use path because I was just playing around, I installed/upgraded almost everything from upstream source, whether it was the kernel, libc, X11(hated those modelines, AcceleratedX was nice), KDE, Gnome, Gimp, endless apps/libraries, and endless hours spent waiting for things to compile(and I'm not a developer). I even ran day to day as the "root" user to avoid permissions issues(and I don't recall ever having bad side effects from doing that despite it was frowned upon at the time and still is I guess). Not sure if I ever upgraded Slackware at least through official means. Learned a lot in those days, some of which still helps me now. People ask me how I learned what I know, what books to read, what classes to take. I can't suggest any specifically since I never read any books or took any classes. Just a lot of messing around in the early days, having no life(still none, and I'm fine with that).

Have been on Debian-based distros since 1998, laptops/etc get Linux Mint/MATE, and servers get Devuan(except firewalls those are OpenBSD, and hypervisors those are esxi). At work most everything has been Ubuntu for the past 12 years, was CentOS at previous jobs, haven't used RHEL since v3 in 2006ish.

[jake]

Re: Slackware 3 was my first distro

As the old .sig says, "Learn RedHat or Debian and you'll know RedHat or Debian. Learn Slackware, and you'll know Linux."

[frotz]

Um, Remember /etc/inittab?

I realize that Slackware booting into runlevel 3 by default might confuse some folks, but really is it so hard to make sure xdm or gdm or kdm or whatever is installed, and then edit /etc/inittab to set the runlevel to 5?

[cuthbertgraak]

Re: Um, Remember /etc/inittab?

On Slackware, the GUI startup is runlevel 4, not runlevel 5.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Um, Remember /etc/inittab?

Ha, that reminds me of a postgrad I worked with coming back from an interview, fuming. It was for part-time Linux admin/support and he had been rejected for giving the wrong answer to the following question:

What does runlevel 5 do?

His answer: it depends entirely upon the contents of the init, let's have a look...

[jake]

Re: Um, Remember /etc/inittab?

For the record, Slackware's runlevel 5 is the same as runlevel 3 (that being multi-user with a CLI).

Note that Slack's inittab is (mostly) self-documenting. Open it up and have a read.

Change 3 to 4 in the relevant spot for it to boot direct to GUI. Simples.

[el_oscuro]

Re: Um, Remember /etc/inittab?

I remember that - and it was pretty easy. Much easier that systemd when it breaks. On one box, it broke after a graphics driver update and just had a blank screen. After a lot off Googling, I was able to boot into a shell, where I found the error message:

"The logind failed to start. Please run journal control for more details."

And the details were:

"The logind failed to start."

Lots of Googling later, I was getting absolutely nowhere. So I found a website: without-systemd.org that had instructions for removing it. I deleted systemd along with the gnome desktop and all the dependencies and replaced it with sys5 and XFCE. That was years ago and I haven't had any issues since.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, 1995..

There I was, freshly recruited by the then leading UK ISP and as yet fairly unacquainted with the Net other than having used bulletin boards, set up some small networks and all sorts of other fun things that bored people with a technical inclination get up to, including a Demon Internet account which I got online after all the then magical incantations that it required (yeah, no idea what a DNS was, or what an IP address actually did - I was just following instructions to get KA9Q going). And, as yet totally unaware of the existence of Unix in general other than a brief run in with Xenix at a friend's house.

I thus get introduced to the People Who Know Stuff, and on discovering I do have a home built PC which I was happy to set up for dual boot (I still needed access to Borland's Paradox and Turbo Pascal) I was offered help to install Linux, with two statements: (1) I was to follow the internal courses for Unix sysadmin and Internet and (2) post installation, I would only get answers to "smart" questions (translated: learn to read man pages and HOWTOs). And it was exactly what I needed.

That was Slackware, on floppies, and the rest is history. I recall ordering CDs from Walnut Creek when new versions came out because Internet (and network) connectivity in those days made that a faster option than downloading (once we had CDROM drives - that came a bit later, usually via a Soundblaster card) - the fact that I can download now a full Debian DVD sized installer in mere minutes is still a source of amazement (not that I would, network installs are feasible with those speeds, but not in the days of 2400 baud :) ). It's through Linux that I learned how the Internet worked (to the point of even having manually configured sendmail.cf before someone came up with the m4 idea), and that deep knowledge serves me to this day. It's also how I learned what robust, reliable computing looks like (I've used HP UX, IMB AIX, FreeBSD, NetBSD, SunOS, Solaris and probably some other variants since), including replacing unstable NT file and print with Linux and other fun stuff like getting an uptime of over a year on a desktop to annoy the Windows server sysadmins at a later employer :).

Personally I now use a mix of MacOS, Debian and OpenSuSE, but I still very much prefer a command line to do things quickly - once you know how to work efficiently, you kinda get impatient with anything else that just gets in your way :).

Happy Birthday Slackware, and thanks for the fond memories.

[el_oscuro]

Doesn't come on floppies anymore

Disk 1 of 2,560

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Doesn't come on floppies anymore

My first Slackware came on 13 3.5" floppies, so maybe you had the very extremely extended edition :)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Doesn't come on floppies anymore

I remember downloading all 24 Slackware images from Walnut Creek's ftp site, and writing them to 1.44MB floppies using a utility on a Mac IIci. Our research group couldn't afford SGI or Sun workstations, but we needed to.run some CERN software. I got the idea to repurpose some 386 and 486 PCs using Linux, a SysV-ish Unix clone. There were a few minor changes to port the CERN code but it was mostly trivial. 30 years later I'm running Linux on a 512 core NUMA box, unimaginable for what was then a hobbyist OS.

[jake]

Re: Doesn't come on floppies anymore

Slackware 1.0 was 13 "A" disks and 11 "X" disks.

[Liam Proven]

Re: Doesn't come on floppies anymore

[Author here]

> Slackware 1.0 was 13 "A" disks and 11 "X" disks.

I am pretty sure I tried it in 1994 or 1995 -- maybe the earlier. So probably Slackware 2.0. But I did have a SCSI CD-ROM, and vivid memories of installing SCO Xenix, Windows 2 and 3, and Novell Netware from whole stacks of dozens of floppies. Netware 3 was over 30 disks, and worse still, I had to make a backup copy first.

Before `xcopy` could page to EMS or XMS.

So copying a 1.4MB disk took ½ dozen swaps: the data had to fit into 640kB of RAM. It took me about 2 wretched days to copy them all, then install it. Each disk being inserted and removed a dozen-odd times.

So I absolutely was not willing to write all those floppies. I downloaded a CD image at work, wrote it to CD-R on my work SCSI CD burner, and wanted to mount that.

The other essential bit of context is that my PC ran OS/2 2.0, so I already had a native 32-bit GUI OS on the hard disk. No cruddy DOS and Windows 3.1 for me, and I was nowhere near rich enough for a machine that could run NT 3.x yet. (After the Slackware experience, I ended up replacing OS/2 with a beta of Windows 95, so that dates it.)

I wanted to keep OS/2, so it needed to go on my SCSI HDD, installed from SCSI CD, so I *needed* that `aha152x` module... but I could not work out the syntax for the IRQ and DMA settings for the kernel module. The fact that I still remember this reflects that I spent quite some time on it!

[jake]

Thanks, Liam.

Have a beer.

[Sanguma]

I remember SLS, patchlevel ?? rather well. I had a 486 with 4 meg of memory, which was excessive for MS DOS 5, endured MS Windows 3.0 and 3.1 and could barely handle IBM OS/2 2.0. And I had some bare intro to Unix (SCO before Caldera took the name) before, and a copy of Tanenbaum's Operating Systems: Design and Implementation and Comer's Operating Systems: The Xinu Approach, which gave me a bare hint of what I was to expect. I survived the installation, but had no Internet connection and not much idea of what to do with it, so I kept fooling around with installing DOS, Windows, and OS/2.

A short time after, I got a CD-ROM drive for that 486 and a pile of Linux and 4.4BSDLite CD-ROMs. Feeling like a pig in clover I installed a number of the small Linux-in-FAT distros on those CD-ROMs until I knew what I was doing, then with a FreeBSD/NetBSD CD-ROM I'd also picked up, I installed the FreeBSD bootloader and the Slackware distro I'd likewise picked up. Pig in clover days alright. I'd intended to compare and contrast FreeBSD and Linux, but never got around to it. With the help of some Unix books, including Frisch's System Admin book, I got my head around Linux, and among other things, wound up using emacs to write a novel. And emacs' meta-x dissociated-press feature to make some nasty comments about some politicos who'd got up my nose.

But then I got myself an updated PC, a copy of Mandrake Linux 9.0 or thenabouts, and felt like a pig in clover again.

[Lee D]

Best part:

No systemd.

[Luiz Abdala]

No GUI?

I used KDE once, 20 years ago, trying dual boot in a Pentium II machine, breathe some life back into it. Maybe a Gnome Ubuntu boot disk in recent epoch to unbork some system when Windows hit the fan (not that often lately, it turns out).

But I never used Slackware... maybe if I had came fresh out of DOS in those days, I would have tried another OS without a GUI.

[jake]

Re: No GUI?

Relax, Slackware comes with a GUI. A couple of them, actually.

What we are talking about is the package installer, which doesn't need the GUI running to work (it uses a thing called "ncurses" for selection boxes and etc.), and the fact that by default Slackware boots into a CLI, which is easily changed if you prefer it to boot into a GUI.

There is a "live" version of slackware-current if you want to try before installing. It works on most modern (but not bleeding edge!) computers.

[hayzoos]

late comer to Slackware

I dabbled with many an OS over the years (too many since 1978). Windows brought in the living money so that is where I spent most of that time. On my personal machines I also used Windows out of bad habit. I did try others from time to time to break the habit, but never happened across Slackware, Slax and Porteus were close. At one point I had committed myself to use Linux starting dual boot with Mandrake from CDs I purchased. That was the dial-up era and CDs via post was faster than downloading. I gave up again when my ISP refused to disclose configuration changes they had made to their pppd to support Windows connections.

When Slackware 15.0 release was announced, I made the jump. Prior to that I went to Mint when Windows 7 went EOL. I was not aware of systemd. Too much of Mint just wasn't right because of systemd when i was poking around under the hood. Slackware is much closer to the *nix I had used before. systemd may not be installed, but it leaves its mark through other softwares' phantom systemd dependencies. It does use elogind from systemd. It could be changed to be more pure non-systemd, but it is systemd-free enough for me. You can even install systemd if you like, Slackware is that flexible.

I have been installing Slackware 15.0-64 from the "live" version. I am comfortable enough with it for the friends and family installs.

May the Slack be with you.

[Proton_badger]

Memories

I also tried out Slackware and Redhat next to my OS/2, so many floppies, does other readers still wake up in a cold sweat hearing bzz bzz bzz bzz bzz “CRC Error”?… but didn’t really do much with Linux until later with Suse, OS/2 was my jam.

These days I enjoy the super quick no-faff install of EndeavourOS, btrfs with snapper, Wayland and as one of the very few (maybe only) here I really enjoy systemd despite my grey/white beard.

[Alistair]

Slackware is still in my list of tools.

Along with a fairly long list of BSD and Linux distros.

Where I hit slackware first? Probably in 94 or 95. Mostly as a "what is this thing" experiement while I was getting comfortable with Netware and other courses at the time.

Where did I use it most? In 97, moving in with the GF, and setting up an internet connection for us, on Dial up. Slackware on an older clunky box did the dial up , and four BNC network cards. Modem setup in slackware was *stupid* simple and worked first time out, routing setup was easy peasy, and I met iptables for the first time. My machine and the GF's online at the same time on dialup blew several friends minds, and thus there were 6 more slackware users added to the list. Fourth card got stuck in an also older machine, for the (at the time) two littles (post 99 I'm fairly sure, since a 1 year old and 2 year old don't computer very well).

Eventually the apartment building got wired up by (Large canadian telecoms provider) with an exclusive agreement on cable. At the time I was working for them so got all sorts of cheap on that front. Replaced the BNC ethernet with 100Mb cable, and *still* had slack as the router. Although at that point the slack box had been upgraded and had both GF's and my websites hosted on board.

It runs in a vm now, with the DNS filters for the network, and manages the firewall rules on the DSL router and the wifi router. For my uses its still an awesome minimalist, solid as a rock OS.

For folks asking me about "this linux thing" if they've done windows basically all their lives, I point them at Mint, if they've done unix of any sort along the way, I point them at Slackware for the basics.

[very cowardly anonymous]

Slackware was my second distribution.

Started with Suse 6.2 from a magazine cover. Then BOUGHT 6.2. The handbook was heavy and amazing.

Did some updates and around 7 I switched over to Slackware - out of curiosity mostly. But also Suse came with a lot of stuff I really did not want to have installed. And slackware didn't.

And I loved it.

Back then I was using a K6-2 400. On Suse building my own kernel made watching mpeg-2 bearable. On Slackware it was mostly fine.

But there was something that made it great: some group (swiss IIRC) provided optimized packages for Slackware! It helped a lot. Really a lot. From 'video stutters once in a while' to 'video never stutters' kind of improvements.

Which is probably why when I stumbled over gentoo 1.0. Switched over. Stayed there. Apart from a short 3 month stint when a nuked ssd and the need to install something ASAP made me use opensuse for a couple of weeks.

While I don't run Slackware anymore, I always remember it fondly and I am always tempted to install it again. What is holding me back is that my gentoo installation is so customized to my desires, that I am very, very reluctant to switch. Maybe the next time my root ssd dies....

[Blackjack]

16GB is what one of my old USB sticks has a storage space.

Still nice to see this is still going.

[leppy232]

Babyfaced Slackware user

I'm going to be using Arch Linux Power when demoing ppc64le Linux for people just for the AUR, but I've had a soft spot for Slackware for the last decade or so now, so I'm still happy it's still around and definitely plan on using it for personal use. BonSlack is a godsend for us PowerPC people. In general, I feel like it's a fairly well rounded desktop OS, a good continuation from Mandriva (alongside Mageia which I also love, but is x86/amd64/arm64 only) if you're not intimidated by commandlines. To this day when I use Fedora or Ubuntu, I still miss the terminal startx configuration tools over a display manager, for instance, because I don't want to type in my actually worth-a-damn-length password in every time I want to switch desktops.