Stuart Winter: I learnt more about Linux in two weeks of using Slackware than in two years of using Red Hat (The Slack World)

[Posted July 5, 2010 by ris]

The Slack World talks with Stuart Winter, a Slackware developer and maintainer of the ARMedslack project. "I started using Red Hat Linux in 1996 for a few years, but had a shell account on a friend's Slackware box. I started reading the config files and the rc scripts and saw how well they were commented and how clean the system looked. All of my systems were ARM desktops back then, apart from the one PC with Red Hat on it. So I got hold of a 486 and installed Slackware v3.5. I learnt more about Linux in two weeks of using Slackware than two years of using Red Hat-purely because everything had to be done by hand."

Stuart Winter: I learnt more about Linux in two weeks of using Slackware than in two years of using Red Hat (The Slack World)

Posted Jul 8, 2010 10:44 UTC (Thu) by viiru (subscriber, #53129) [Link] (3 responses)

I agree with the usefulness of Slackware as a teaching tool. My first Linux install was from a Slackware 3.4 cd that came with a magazine in early 1998. I hacked on that for quite some time but eventually replaced it with Suse (since a Suse cd happened to come with a magazine) in the hopes of getting newer software.

Suse was in many ways a clear step backwards, doing things manually was very difficult and tended to kill the included automatic configuration tools, and I soon replaced it with Redhat (5-series, I think) which was recommended by a friend who could also make copies of his installation cd. (boy was life different when one couldn't simply download cd images of the net)

Redhat was much better, but still not quite what I had in mind (reasonable amount of reasonably recent software included, but still possible to do things by hand), and it ended up being replaced with Debian which had a ridiculous amount of prepackaged binaries and was still manually hackable when needed. I haven't looked back since, but I do think that for a beginner the currently popular distros (and Debian itself) are way too easy. Necessity is the great teacher, and I did learn a large part of the skills I now use for a living hacking away on that Slackware box trying to make the toy of the day work on it.

Stuart Winter: I learnt more about Linux in two weeks of using Slackware than in two years of using Red Hat (The Slack World)

Posted Jul 9, 2010 15:04 UTC (Fri) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] (2 responses)

I for one want to use the machine, not spend endless time tweaking it to the point it becomes useful...

Stuart Winter: I learnt more about Linux in two weeks of using Slackware than in two years of using Red Hat (The Slack World)

Posted Jul 9, 2010 20:38 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

then just go use windows/OSX ;-)

it's not that you want to have to do lots of tweaking of things, it's that you should _be able_ to tweak lots of things, and (especially) if you are making a living with the software, you should know _how_ to tweak things because that may be a large part of your job.

you don't _have_ to know this stuff, but knowing it and being able to tweak things appropriately (key word) can make you significantly more productive.

like anything else, it's possible to go overboard on the tweaking and spend so much time tweaking that you can't possible save that much time later.

Stuart Winter: I learnt more about Linux in two weeks of using Slackware than in two years of using Red Hat (The Slack World)

Posted Jul 14, 2010 3:24 UTC (Wed) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

I fully agree with you, but for me Slackware does require too much tweaking/handholding for my taste. But it is a free world, everybody should find their own comfortable place.