Slack

[cuzvinn]

I am a FreeBSD turned Red Hat user, and Im having a hard time adjusting. Ive heard that SlackWare follows the format of BSD more than any other Linux based distro and am considering giving it a spin. Basically I want to hear from some SlackWare lovers and haters to find some of the positives and negatives. X_console, I know your down with slack; whats your thoughts?

Any comments appreciated.

[X_console]

Yes, Slackware does follow BSD-init scripts, so you'll probably have an easy time adjusting to it. It also has some support for SysV type init scripts.

The Good:
Stable, lean, installation is simple and fast, and you have full control over what packages can be installed. I especially like the tagfiles feature which allows you to configure what packages you want installed so the next time you install Slack, you can skip the choosing of packages just by popping the disk in. Slack tends to not include bleeding edge software unless it's been tried and tested by the Slack dev-team. The package manager is simple (shell script) and you can download slackpacks off http://www.linuxmafia.org if you don't like compiling stuff. Slack is perfect if you want to install Linux on a small hard drive 150-200MB. You can fit it in there.

The Bad:
Package manager is constantly being worked on. It doesn't check for dependencies so Linux newbies might have a hard time wondering why their program doesn't work. Also doesn't warn you about any dependencies until you actually run the program and it complains of missing libraries. Upgrading can be a pain because there is no stable auto-update program at the moment. There are a few being worked on, but it's not included into Slackware by default.

Another thing I don't like is the way they're handling security issues these days. Before they would have patched packages up within two or three days of the vulnerability being published. Now they've been pretty quiet lately. They've got a security-mailing list going on but I'm not getting any mail. Slack can be made pretty secure, but it's up to you to do it. Linuxmafia.org does have updated packages though, so those can be used.

[jaygee432]

Just try it for yourself and see. You know you want to.