Hugo Hacker News

Slackware 15.0 release candidate one

syncsynchalt 2021-08-16 19:26:42 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Slackware 3.0 was my first distro, in probably 1995.

I'm very curious what modern Slackware is like in practice, given their philosophy and guidance listed in http://www.slackware.com/info/

throwaway47292 2021-08-16 19:34:51 +0000 UTC [ - ]

It was 3.6 for me, I still miss it.

To be honest, I have been completely overwhelmed by the modern web, ads and cookie warnings are just giving me anxiety, and I mean real physical anxiety. I will go back to my roots, my tty only experience is getting better and better[1]. When I patched the kernel to make the cursor non blinking block, I got such joy, I felt I was a kid again.

Great news that slack is still around! It gives me hope.

[1] https://dev.to/jackdoe/tty-only-1ijn

cyphax 2021-08-16 19:54:31 +0000 UTC [ - ]

In practice, it is largely like other similar distributions. I've been running Slackware for many years, but the wait for 15 was too long for me so I installed Arch Linux out of curiousity, and found there's a lot of similarities between the "core" repository and user repositories (AUR and Slackbuilds) and how complete they are. For me, the hardest part of this switch was systemd actually. Otherwise it's mostly using the same software (DE, browser, etc).

silisili 2021-08-16 19:38:24 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Slack was also my first. Amazed to see Pat still at it given all the time that's passed. I'm curious to know how many out there still use slack? I can't say I have in a solid 15-20 years.

bstamour 2021-08-16 20:17:48 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I still use it on my primary desktop computer at home. It's a great, stable system that just keeps on running and doing what it needs to do.

t3lp3r10n 2021-08-16 21:21:39 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I still use it on the computer room of our physics department (around 30 PCs). Slackware is the only distro stable enough to perform excellent on this heterogenous machines mix where some computers could be ten years old. I use a golden image, created and set up with packer and some scripts, and image it using clonezilla.

efficax 2021-08-17 03:32:37 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Surely debian would be fine on it, i even run fedora on a few 10 to 12 year old machines (heck ten years ago you already had Intel core chips)

_trampeltier 2021-08-16 20:03:17 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Also Slackware 3.0 here. It was on a CD on my first Linux book. 95 or 96 i also would guess.

smhenderson 2021-08-16 22:56:53 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I think we had the same book. I remember laughing out loud when I read on the back "Dyslexics of the world, untie!"

I still run Slack today, by far my favorite distro; as they say the most *nix-like distro

dmitryminkovsky 2021-08-16 20:45:35 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Same here, though probably 1996 or 1997 and on a 486 we got somewhere for free. I made install floppies. I never did get XFree86 configured, unfortunately :(. But it was awesome to install Linux and play around with it.

bdcravens 2021-08-16 19:37:00 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Don't remember the version, but it was mine as well, around 1998. I still remember setting up all the feature-specific floppies.

shmoe 2021-08-16 20:02:13 +0000 UTC [ - ]

dude.. me too.. imaging the rainbow boot disk. Or was it color? now I have to check :P

ujeezy 2021-08-16 19:38:29 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I love that the website is the same design as when I first discovered Slackware in 1999 https://web.archive.org/web/19991117022152/http://slackware....

wrycoder 2021-08-16 20:48:07 +0000 UTC [ - ]

From the Slack About:

Curious about the machine running this site, eh? Also fairly high on the importance scale (for this site, anyway) is the box itself. The machine is a Pentium III, 600 MHz, with 512 megabytes of RAM. It runs (of course) Slackware Linux, and does an efficient and reliable job even with moderately old hardware. The slackware.com site has been known to run for well over a year without a reboot.

IronWolve 2021-08-16 19:41:41 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Man I use to buy slackware cd's from walnut creek back in the day, dialup wasn't fast enough to get the latest version.

https://archive.org/details/walnutcreekcdrom old cdrom.com

Think I went from slackware to mandrake to fedora/suse then ubuntu(lts)/suse(tumbleweed), to now just Ubuntu(lts) due to ppa's and google/nvidia docker/drivers dev work.

For the servers I'm ditching centos7(eol) for amazon linux 2 now that they support on premise deploys for free. AL3 is unknown at the moment for support... I did for a short time use FreeBSD for servers back in the buffer overflow attacks on Linux when doing my self hosting, but that was 20+ years ago.

Fun Memories and no idea what the future will be. Even Debian is pretty damn good now, but Ubuntu has more polish but Debian has more packages and a better install. IMHO.

fullstop 2021-08-16 20:24:28 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I spent a few months downloading the floppy sets at night just to find out that my SCSI card was not supported.

sildur 2021-08-16 20:51:53 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Under which metric is Ubuntu more polished than Debian? I had the impression that Ubuntu is more user friendly, but buggier than Debian. Honestly asking.

sshine 2021-08-16 22:29:18 +0000 UTC [ - ]

>> Ubuntu has more polish

> Ubuntu more polished than Debian?

I'm not a native English speaker, but I sense a discrepancy here:

"Ubuntu has more polish" = "it ships with more UI trinkets and background processes enabled; it is more plug-and-play". Whereas "Ubuntu is more polished" carries the notion that it's a finer product that people put more effort into; that can't easily be said. They're both fine products, but have different distro goals.

IronWolve 2021-08-17 04:23:48 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Ubuntu desktops releases I mean are more visually nice on install, Debian needs more configuration after install. Both are basically the same, just the Configuration for Mate looks better on install for the desktop distros of ubuntu.

Kinda like how Mint was doing it.

vergessenmir 2021-08-16 20:07:30 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I took a similar journey. I remember getting slackware on 16 3.5inch floppy disks and being super excited on being able to run an OS that took less memory and being able to build and run polyray faster. Then I moved onto slack from walnut creek. Then mandrake Then redhat Then Ubuntu when I got to uni.

readingnews 2021-08-16 19:37:47 +0000 UTC [ - ]

What timing!! I am so tired of ubuntu derivatives... Call me crazy, but too many things are getting in the way of me just using Linux. I went back to Gentoo on most of my boxes, but was actually feeling like Slack not two weeks ago, only to see it still on 14. A bit dated. Now I can check it out again! Get slack!

MisterTea 2021-08-16 19:59:23 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I had Linux Mint drive me to nearly throw my computer out of the window before I realized there were two different network configuration UI programs fighting each other. One accessed from the Cinnamon system tray and the one in the configuration menu. One was set to dhcp and the other static and the static setting was overriding the dhcp setting. Complete WTF moment.

Now I just use Void Linux Musl with XFCE and install bloated programs like LibreOffice or Steam via flatpack.

klyrs 2021-08-16 19:54:28 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Nearly all of my complaints about Ubuntu evaporated when I switched over to using i3wm. There's still a couple of weird annoyances, but I'll gripe about anything I use.

markstos 2021-08-16 20:00:57 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Nearly all of my complaints about i3wm evaporated when I switched over to using Sway.

klyrs 2021-08-16 20:02:28 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Okay, I'll bite. What didn't you like about i3 and/or what does Sway do better?

markstos 2021-08-16 20:16:04 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I was interested to use Wayland for its more secure design. Also, X11 is considered abandonware by the maintainers: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=XServer-...

As long as I was getting started with a new environment I wanted to make a forward-looking choice.

Due to Wayland, Sway does have smoother window resizing with less jank.

One detail I liked about Sway at the time is that it supposed an "include" file directive, allowing you to break up your config file. i3wm has recently adopted that feature from Sway:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=XServer-...

cholmon 2021-08-16 21:07:03 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I'm a bit surprised to see the site has a Let's Encrypt certificate, but it redirects from HTTPS to HTTP;

https://www.slackware.com/ redirects to http://www.slackware.com/

carlhjerpe 2021-08-16 22:09:55 +0000 UTC [ - ]

While old-school and a bit funny, not being on https while sporting downloads of something as significant as an operating system isn't what i would want to do. The internet isn't "fun" anymore and we need all security we can get or someone will exploit you.

xorcist 2021-08-16 22:24:16 +0000 UTC [ - ]

For something as significant as an operating system, please always check the gpg signatures. Do not rely on transport security.

lightbulbjim 2021-08-16 22:36:17 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Plus the downloads are served by mirrors and torrents anyway.

beermonster 2021-08-16 20:59:48 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Ah, making a boot and root floppy using rawwrite. Brings back fond memories. Slackware still has a place in my heart :-)

ydlr 2021-08-16 23:37:20 +0000 UTC [ - ]

More signifivany for me, it still has a place in my laptop.

mikewave 2021-08-16 19:44:31 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The Subgenius must have Slack.

phone8675309 2021-08-16 21:57:53 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Repent! Quit your job! Slack off! And Praise "Bob"!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt9MP70ODNw

tannhaeuser 2021-08-16 19:41:01 +0000 UTC [ - ]

But, does it run systemd?

syncsynchalt 2021-08-16 19:52:23 +0000 UTC [ - ]

No. I can think of nothing more aligned with Slackware philosophy than staying on rc.d

evilDagmar 2021-08-16 19:51:08 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Have we seen any news about Patrick having a catastrophic aneurysm?

pwg 2021-08-16 19:45:11 +0000 UTC [ - ]

It does not.

2021-08-16 19:57:57 +0000 UTC [ - ]

jmclnx 2021-08-16 20:43:40 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Great, I have a newist laptop and it keeps asking "When will you put Slackware on me ?".

But, people should go here instead since I heard slackware.com is an old 32 bit machine.

https://slackware.osuosl.org/slackware64-current/ChangeLog.t...

But that shows Slakware can take a beating and keep on ticking. :)

hitpointdrew 2021-08-16 20:59:07 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I really want to love Slackware, but I can't bring myself to use a distro that has basically a single person as the maintainer. What happens if Patrick Volkerding gets hit by a bus? That's it, no more patches, no more updates? Really wish Slackware had a team of maintainers.

lightbulbjim 2021-08-16 21:37:24 +0000 UTC [ - ]

It used to be that he had a handful of core people who helped out, but it was never official AFAIK.

I feel the same as you. I used Slackware on my primary machine for about a decade, but the long silence between 14.2 and 15 made me nervous.

Koshkin 2021-08-17 00:15:24 +0000 UTC [ - ]

To be fair, there has been no “silence,” the stream of updates has been quite lively.

lightbulbjim 2021-08-17 03:41:24 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Yes, -current has been moving along. I'm too lazy for rolling release though.

corentin88 2021-08-16 20:35:51 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Would be great that HN points out unsecured links (i.e. not HTTPS)

hulitu 2021-08-17 09:45:01 +0000 UTC [ - ]

There is no security in HTTPS. Are you completely sure you are not MITM ?

modshatereality 2021-08-16 21:16:57 +0000 UTC [ - ]

If you're scared go to church.

q-rews 2021-08-16 19:25:53 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Now there’s a name I hadn’t heard in 20 years. I thought I had something to do with Winamp at first read.

metalliqaz 2021-08-16 19:36:51 +0000 UTC [ - ]

wow that website brings me back.

it's horribly out of date but I can see why they kept it. its readable with good information density, and many times faster than js-laden project websites that use frameworks designed for SPAs to display a changelog

s_dev 2021-08-16 19:59:29 +0000 UTC [ - ]

It's not 'out of date' in my book but very much on brand for the intended audience like:

https://www.openbsd.org/

A very intentional design choice that reflects what the project values.

anjbe 2021-08-16 21:03:17 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Incidentally, the OpenBSD website, while visually little‐changed since the 1990s, is 100% valid HTML5. Decent quality HTML too, with proper use of tags and good separation of presentation into external CSS.

hulitu 2021-08-17 09:42:25 +0000 UTC [ - ]

But is it valid HTML6 ? Some people are just running for version numbers.

pavon 2021-08-16 20:35:57 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The style of the background image is dated (although since it is more subtle than others of the era it doesn't stick out too badly), but the rest of the design is clean and remarkably modern looking for a site that hasn't been redesigned in over 20 years.

xuhu 2021-08-16 20:07:14 +0000 UTC [ - ]

The page loads in 10 seconds on an i7-10850H, and it's not due to downloading the html. Chrome just freezes while parsing the DOM or something.

handrous 2021-08-16 20:49:33 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Loading it locally I get 2s of "styles recalculated" taking almost the entire load time, in Safari's "Timeline" tool. Wrapping the main body text in a <pre>, with no other changes, drops that to 0.8s total layout time.

It's the tens of thousands of <br> tags in that block doing it, then, I guess.

slim 2021-08-16 21:29:50 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Could be. Html is full of errors https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slackware....

handrous 2021-08-17 00:13:21 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Most of those are warnings like "the attribute you've used from back when HTML was slim and fast is obsolete, please use this slower modern thing instead". I doubt that's making the page slow. Only a few are actual errors.

lrem 2021-08-16 20:29:56 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Firefox on a Surface Pro deals with it just fine.