Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 10, 2026 14:59 UTC (Sat) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648)
In reply to: Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop by felixfix
Parent article: Gentoo looks back on 2025

You could try Slackware instead of Gentoo. Slackware doesn't even support SystemD -- it uses normal sysvinit -- so you wouldn't have to worry about bit rot.

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Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 10, 2026 15:12 UTC (Sat) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] (2 responses)

I used Slackware for probably about 10 years, from some 0.99 kernel until I built a tower with two AMD Opteron 64 bitters, and there was no 64-bit Slackware. That's when I switched to Gentoo. Besides the 64 bit switch, what I appreciated the most was being able to update in place and not have to reinstall from scratch, then manually reinstall all the packages I had added.

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 10, 2026 15:36 UTC (Sat) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, the 64-bit problem has long been solved, and by the way Slackware is one of the last distros I know of that still supports 32-bit x86 as a first-class citizen. I use slapt-get with Slackware64-current. It updates the packages in a rolling release fashion. Things do break, mostly when a package depends on a new shared library and I don't have that shared library installed because it just got added to the archive. There are definitely ways to fix that automatically -- probably as simple as doing "slapt-get --install-set l" or something -- but it never annoyed me enough to figure out how.

If you'd prefer a more traditional experience, you definitely can upgrade from one Slackware release to another without needing to perform a full reinstall (and my goodness, I'm sorry you didn't know that back then!).

http://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware64-15.0/U...

Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 10, 2026 15:50 UTC (Sat) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link]

If an upgrade path existed from one Slackware version to the next, I'm sure I knew about it and used it. But whatever it was, it wasn't as smooth and finely-grained as Gentoo, which was as seamless as could be. I don't remember ever worrying about some library getting out of date. It may have happened, but if so, too rarely for me to remember now or worry about.