Slackware 12.0 released [LWN.net]

Slackware 12.0 released

Posted Jul 4, 2007 19:16 UTC (Wed) by jordanb (subscriber, #45668)
In reply to: Slackware 12.0 released by peace
Parent article: Slackware 12.0 released

I moved from Slackware to Redhat and finally to Debian in around 1999 (my first debian install was slink-and-a-half).

My problem with Slack and Redhat is that they got to the point where they were unusable, and I was forced to reinstall. I don't computers should work that way, where you install and then they slowly disintegrate upgrade to upgrade until they're rendered useless.

With Debian, it's possible to maintain a system interminably in a pretty low-entropy state. That doesn't mean it's simple, you do have to be careful and clean things up from time to time, but it's very doable.

My current desktop, that I'm sitting in front of now, started out life as Potato. Now it's running Lenny. It's gone through five hard drives (I keep full backups) and four computers in that time (started out as a 233mhz Pentium II, then a 950mhz Athlon, then a loaner 750mhz Athlon when the former died, now a 1ghz PIII) In all that time, it's only been installed once. It still works great. I still put new software on it occasionally, and remove old stuff. Every upgrade has been pretty near flawless, even in testing.

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Slackware 12.0 released

Posted Jul 4, 2007 22:17 UTC (Wed) by juhl (subscriber, #33245) [Link]

In my opinion, Slack is no more difficult to keep up-to-date than any other distro - in fact I'd say it's sometimes easier since you don't have to fight package dependencies all the time.
My main workstation started out as a Slackware 4.0 install and is currently at a completely up-to-date Slackware 12.0. Ok, I must admit that the 4.0 --> 7.0 upgrade was "interesting", but from then on it has been smooth sailing.
Why is it that you feel Slackware installs disintegrate over time?

Slackware 12.0 released

Posted Jul 7, 2007 11:41 UTC (Sat) by danieldk (subscriber, #27876) [Link]

"In my opinion, Slack is no more difficult to keep up-to-date than any other distro - in fact I'd say it's sometimes easier since you don't have to fight package dependencies all the time."

That's also the downside of Slackware. E.g. recently many packages have been split. With a "dependency-aware" system like dpkg + APT, such splits will be handled automatically. With Slackware it will continue to work, but with your old packages, at some point you have to replace the larger packages by split packages manually.

I have pretty much used Slackware exclusively since 1994 until 2003. Since then I have pretty much moved on to NetBSD/Debian/CentOS. I don't care too much about compiling everything manually anymore, I lost the time to do that. It's nice to be able to yum/apt-get install a high-quality package when you need it.

Of course, each to his/her hown. The point isn't that there is one perfect distro.

Slackware 12.0 released

Posted Jul 5, 2007 8:19 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

That's the thing I ran into with Debian.

It's not so much apt-get that does anything magical, it's the time and effort that the Debian project puts into making a large number of quality software packages.

When running stable you don't have to worry about a new Samba version breaking your configuration file or some part of LAMP updated that breaks some server side script or whatever. This is the same as you get with Slackware.

But what is extra is that Debian also does a pretty decent job of making sure that upgrades between releases are nice. When you upgrade between different versions things generally go well.

With Slackware it's ok as long as you stick with the packages that are provided by Slackware, but once you venture off on your own with compiling software and such then you loose a lot of the benifit of having a quality distribution. Over a period of a year or two you end up with a fairly large number of custom libraries and applications that you just don't know will survive the upgrades. Plus you have to go through all the recompile again to upgrade those packages and it's 100% up to you to stay on top of security patches and other such things. This is less of a problem with Debian just because the massive amount of packages aviable that there is usually very little reason to have to run much software compiled from source.

In other words Debian allows me to be more lazy.

I do like slackware a lot though. It's great how it's stable and how it stays out of your way. With Debian apt-get and the packages rule your computer, you sacrifice a lot of control and it was hard for me to deal with that after moving from Slackware to Debian.