Five Reasons I Prefer Slackware Over Ubuntu (fullmetalgerbil) [LWN.net]

Dave at the fullmetalgerbil weblog has this post presenting five reasons why he prefers Slackware over Ubuntu. "Really, when I thought about doing this I wondered if I could come up with five reasons but now I'm sure I could go on much longer. Slackware is the oldest existing Linux distribution and it didn't get to being around this long by being sub par. There's a general consensus that the post install configuration of Slackware may be a bit too challenging for beginners, but I think anyone who can read a copy of the Slackbook and use a Slackware forum if need be would be able to do it. Believe me, it's worth the initial effort and like Trent of the Linux Critic says-once you go slack, you never go back."

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Five Reasons I Prefer Slackware Over Ubuntu (fullmetalgerbil)

Posted Jul 5, 2009 18:09 UTC (Sun) by dmag (subscriber, #17775) [Link]

My reason for using Slackware is Simplicity.

Most distros complicate the internals of the OS in order to make the User presentation easy. This sounds neat if you always want to stay a User and never advance to the next level. Slackware is simple enough that you can understand the simplicity of UNIX.

Slackware does the simplest thing that could possibly work, and assumes users can edit files for the advanced cases. For example, networking configuration used to be in one shell script. Now it's two: a shell script, and a "config file" (really a shell script). You can blow it all away and hard-code "ifconfig eth0 10.1.1.1" if you want -- you won't break anything else.

If you "look under the hood" you will find simple shell scripts with UNIX commands. When you become an expert in Slackware, you are an expert in the fundamentals of all UNIX systems. Other distros try to "simplify" things with custom commands, so you have to chase thru multiple scripts and multiple config files.

Slackware doesn't try to customize upstream packages, and the "package management" is simply "untar" with a post-install script. This means that it's easy to upgrade "manually" (directly from upstream).

Fancy package management systems are better for Users (who want seamless install and uninstall without worrying about the details). But Slackware is better for sysadmins who value stability. The package management system never gets "confused" because of manual upgrades and the like.