Hey fellow Linux enthusiasts! I’m curious to know if any of you use a less popular, obscure or exotic Linux distribution. What motivated you to choose that distribution over the more mainstream ones? I’d love to hear about your experiences and any unique features or benefits that drew you to your chosen distribution.
I use Slackware, which is so unpopular it doesn’t even show up in this thread, yet.
What made me choose it is the fact that it hardly ever changes, at all. It’s a bit weird to set up at first, but all knowledge gained about it will stay relevant for a very long time. Also, it is a real general purpose distro, so I can use it on my gaming PC, laptop and server.
Debian would probably be a better choice when I just take practicability into account, but I like Slackware’s philosophy, and running a system that forces me to learn it inside out. Arch is too bleeding edge for me.
I would love to use Slackware as a daily driver, but no package management OOTB makes me feel I am not worthy of using it. I believe third-party tools exist, so maybe I will use it at some point, but perhaps I’d be better served with Void for now
In practice, Slackware package management after installation works like Arch’s AUR.
You install (or build) packages from a community-maintained repo and are officially supposed to do it manually and always read the build scripts and READMEs, but a helper with dependency resolution (slpkg) exists, works well and most people use it.
What do you use? What are some problems you have with Slackware?
I use slackpkg+ which is an addon to the default package manager that allows you to install packages from community and third-party repositories.
And sbopkg which gives you a TUI frontend to install Slackbuilds (Slackware-specific build scripts for building from source).
Neither offer dependency resolution, which I don’t really need anyway.
Now that I know how Slackware works and what its quirks are, I don’t really have any issues with it. But it’s pretty hard to figure that out when you’re coming from more modern distros. It throws curveballs at you, like not booting after a kernel upgrade if you forget to copy the new kernel to your EFI partition and recreate the initramfs.
Most online documentation is wildly out of date and googling is no help due to how few users there are.
It took a while till I figured out the README files that come preinstalled with the distro are actually the official, up-to-date documentation and very helpful, and also that the place where most users (including the maintainers and author of the distro) gather and answer questions is the linuxquestions.org forum.
How do you install packages without appropriate dependency resolution?
I didn’t know about that. I should probably run it in a VM for a while before trying
You read the package’s .dep file, which lists dependencies, add those to your install queue in the right order and then install the queue.
It’s not as daunting as it sounds, since the default Slackware installation already includes most common dependencies.
The most dependencies I ever had to install for a package were 3. But if you need a lot of additional software with many dependencies, it’s best to do it just once for installing slpkg and then let that tool deal with it.
Thanks. I’m probably going to install some software for IOT devices alongside the usual workstation stuff (vim, tmux, browsers, audio, git, htop, a WM with add-ons etc). I’ll take a look at
slpkg.There’s more than one way to skin a cat. Reading the .dep files is more advanced than how I do it.
There are a ton of community maintained install scripts for packages that don’t ship with the OS. Check out slackbuilds.org. Search for nicotine. It lists the dependencies there with links to their scripts. And it tells you if there are optional dependencies for additional features.
Sbopkg is an extra program that automates downloading, building and installing slackbuilds and the source code for whatever you’re trying to install. And you can queue up multiple programs and run them in a batch.
Come say hi at ##seven on irc.libera.chat (I use the hexchat app that ships with slackware). We’re a small group that broke away from ##slackware. I’ve been on slackware over 20 years and am the least experienced person there.
ETA: if you use grub, you can just run grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg inoted of doing all that fiddling. Unless of course you like fiddling, then carry on!
I’ve never heard of slpkg. I’ll have to check it out. Thanks for the tip.
Sbopkg is amazing though. It takes all the tedious work out of installing anything python related from slackbuilds.org scripts.
Slackpkg ships with the OS and is a very capable package manger for updating the stock OS.
You’re probably talking about dependency management. I like being my own dependency manager. It forces me to read and learn about everything that goes into my computer. And I can skip optional features I don’t need to keep bloat down. And I can catch when a dependency will conflict with something else I have installed as a dependency of another package. But you do trade away some convenience doing it this way and it’s not for everyone.
Holy hell, two slackware mentions so far. Is it my birthday? It’s been my daily driver since the late 90s because it just works and I can do anything I want with it. I’m on -current now due to a recent hardware upgrade and it’s still rock solid.