Slackware was my first introduction to Linux. I initially investigated it as a way to get around my parents setting a password on Windows. Thanks, mom and dad, for the (very unintentional) motivation that set me on the career path I'm on now.
IMHO, Slackware is close to the local maximum in the space of imperative distros. I think adding dependency resolution is the only thing it misses vs Arch or Void. But like those, it's barebones and it ships simple lean binary packages. Going back to Slackware was a brisk of fresh air when Ubuntu and friends got too complex. Sometimes things break, and it's hard to understand why due to the overwhelming amount of things they ship with.
There's nothing like having total control of what you are running, and Slackware is really good at this.
I think the future are functional distributions like NixOS or GuixSD. For many use cases, they are just ready for prime time. For others (e.g. R or Julia), where heavy patching / wrapping of packages is needed, there's still a bit of work to be done.
I could think your entire post might've been written by me if you replaced Slackware with Arch. I haven't tried Slackware, but this makes me wonder how similar it is to Arch.
What do you mean it's missing dependency resolution? Do you need to install dependencies of packages manually?
Out of the box, you do have to install dependencies manually, but you don't have to track them, which is the part I would dislike about dependency resolution. Assuming you have a full installation (where all dependencies will be met), and you find your package on slackbuilds, dependencies will be listed and can be installed with about the same ease as you would install a package on, say, Debian.
> I think adding dependency resolution is the only thing it misses vs Arch or Void
Please, no! Having independent packages is a huge plus! I moved out of voidlinux because I could not install the X headers without python2, due to some silly "dependency".
Same here! I recall my dad complaining that it was causing issues to windows when dual booting when I was a teenager. But damn getting a modem working in that era was tremendous bitch.
Circa mid 1990s, I tried to get my hands on Linux and tried to dual boot to a separate hard drive that I bought with chore/spare job money. Boy, did I fuck that up. Rendered both installs useless. Don't recall how, but had to manually edit the partition tables on the main Windows drive. As long as they had that PC, it never did report the correct partition size in several places...but it booted & worked, so I wasn't grounded. Wasn't really until college in 2002-2003 that I experimented with *nix again, but that was with a dedicated 2nd hand laptop running FreeBSD so I could access OSS VLSI tools. What a time...
I have fond memories of holding a printed out gentoo install manual and watching windows getting wiped from my box as a kid.
Then the terror of getting the modem to dial from a terminal, using lynx to get some browsing going so i could figure out how to get some GUI going on the thing.
Finally, getting Wine to run CS 1.6 so I could play at LAN parties with my buddies. They all thought I was a wizard because I was running this strange OS.
I genuinely believed that gentoo was going to give my machine super powers because all the software was "compiled and optimised for my machine." Maybe that was a little off the mark, but a great learning experience!
Now everyone has a smartphone, so it's hard to replicate that feeling of being cut off from the net with just a printed manual and your determination to carry you through. Good times!
I think in those days you had to use a terminal emulator of some sort (maybe minicom?) to dial the ISP, then background (without hanging up), then run up pppd. I had no idea what was going on with this process.
Obviously at this stage, a working X was a fantasy. You had your 6 ttys and that was it.
My first linux was redhat 5 from the CD on the back of a book - it didn't support my SIS 6326 card -- funny how I remember what graphics card I had 20 years ago, but have no idea what's in my desktop at the moment other than "some nvidia thing".
According to a post I can still find on usenet: "I got X running in 600*480 but the mouse pointer was corrupt, so they were close, but not close enough."
I assume I was dual-booting with windows 95 or 98 for my first year or so, at least until I got a better graphics card -- a Voodoo Banshee I think. I'd moved to debian by September 2000 though when I went to uni, and a year later when I saw in the Billenium with date running in an xterm.
> Now everyone has a smartphone, so it's hard to replicate that feeling of being cut off from the net with just a printed manual and your determination to carry you through
It's amazing how we used to survive without the sum knowledge of humanity available at our fingerprints.
Also known as "manually pumping the message loop". I'm almost certain that that program was handling communications events on the same thread as the message pump, and only relying on a very slow timer to move them through. There was probably plenty of such badly-written software back then, because 16-bit Windows was cooperatively multitasked and had no concept of threads.
You were lucky that you only knew Windows and had concerned parents.
At around the same time I had people show me various flavours of Linux with great enthusiasm. I was supposed to be impressed but I had SGI Irix plus applications for it. From my perspective I could not see the point of this 'toy operating system'. It was a bit like one of those cloned Chinese cars that we used to laugh about, with stupid names for programs that were sensibly named in real UNIX.
As a consequence I missed the boat and only started with Linux when Ubuntu came along.
