How I came to Slackware
by JayByrd from LinuxQuestions.org on (#5NDD0)
Having been lurking around this forum for the past four years, I figured it was about time that I join up. And as an introduction, I thought I'd relate the story of how I came to use the hands-down best Linux distro on the planet.
My first Linux experience began near the turn of the millennium. For Christmas 2000, my mother bought me the "Red Hat Linux Bible" which came with RH 7.2 on CDs. I dove right in and was loving it. However, due to some unsupported hardware, I was never able to fully embrace RH as my daily driver--it was just something to play with.
As the years went by, I would occasionally try out other distros, but continued using M$ for my day-to-day needs: Win2K at first, then eventually XP.
Then, in 2012, I took a couple of IT courses at my local community college. They offered free copies of Win7 to anyone who passed the whole course series and then passed the test to get A+ certification. I brought home my shiny new Win7 CD and installed it. Within 20 minutes I realized that M$ had "devolved" certain functionality that I depended on and was forced to revert back to XP. It really ticked me off that M$ went out of their way to reduce the functionality of their product, and when I found a blog post that explained why they had done it, I was even more furious.
So, I decided to ditch M$ altogether and migrate to Linux for my daily driver. I tried out PClinuxOS and liked it. This would be my desktop for the next five years.
In the summer of 2017, one of my closest friends passed away at just 36 years old. He was a BOINC enthusiast. So I decided that, in tribute to him, I'd dust off one of the old PCs in my basement and make a BOINC crunching rig. My idea was to create a minimal, CLI-only system that would do nothing but crunch.
It was while contemplating the possibilities for building this system that I hit on the idea of trying out Slackware. In the past, I had been scared off by all the talk I'd seen online: "Slack isn't for noobs," "Slack is for Linux experts only," etc. Now, though, instead of playing around on my daily driver, I was endeavoring to build a CLI system from scratch, so I figured "now is as good a time as any."
Lo and behold, not only was the Slackware install process the most straightforward of any distro I'd ever encountered, but the system management was slick as snot, too! A little reading here at LQ and the Slackdocs, and I was quickly being converted to a full-on Slackware enthusiast. I ended up building another BOINC box, then another...
And then, after building up several of the BOINC rigs, it finally happened: my PClinuxOS desktop was hosed after a routine update. (After rebooting, X wouldn't start.) Since I had been using this same install continually for nearly six years (PCLOS is rolling release,) I wasn't eager to change. But after some feeble attempts to roll back the update, I decided that this was some kind of a sign (from the universe or whatever) that it was time for me to start using Slackware for my GUI-based daily driver in addition to my headless CLI-only systems.
Needless to say, it worked like a charm. I now have three desktop systems running Slackware with XFCE, plus a laptop I built for a friend. My only regret is that I bought into the hype that Slackware was too "technical" and avoided it for so many years. (In fact, I find Slackware to be the easiest distro to install and use.) Looking back, I should have been on Slackware from the beginning, and now that I'm here, I'll never go back.
Many thanks to the Slackware community here at LQ. (I've turned to this site quite a lot over the last four years for both background info and answers to technical questions.) I'd also like to thank Willy Sr., R. Workman, and all the folks at SBo.
And a special thank-you to Eric H. Your tutorials/learning materials have been invaluable to me. (Firewall, repo, etc.) And I particularly want to thank you for your amazing VLC slackbuild script.
Last but not least, to Pat: a million thanks for creating (and maintaining) the best distro ever. Long live Slackware!
My first Linux experience began near the turn of the millennium. For Christmas 2000, my mother bought me the "Red Hat Linux Bible" which came with RH 7.2 on CDs. I dove right in and was loving it. However, due to some unsupported hardware, I was never able to fully embrace RH as my daily driver--it was just something to play with.
As the years went by, I would occasionally try out other distros, but continued using M$ for my day-to-day needs: Win2K at first, then eventually XP.
Then, in 2012, I took a couple of IT courses at my local community college. They offered free copies of Win7 to anyone who passed the whole course series and then passed the test to get A+ certification. I brought home my shiny new Win7 CD and installed it. Within 20 minutes I realized that M$ had "devolved" certain functionality that I depended on and was forced to revert back to XP. It really ticked me off that M$ went out of their way to reduce the functionality of their product, and when I found a blog post that explained why they had done it, I was even more furious.
So, I decided to ditch M$ altogether and migrate to Linux for my daily driver. I tried out PClinuxOS and liked it. This would be my desktop for the next five years.
In the summer of 2017, one of my closest friends passed away at just 36 years old. He was a BOINC enthusiast. So I decided that, in tribute to him, I'd dust off one of the old PCs in my basement and make a BOINC crunching rig. My idea was to create a minimal, CLI-only system that would do nothing but crunch.
It was while contemplating the possibilities for building this system that I hit on the idea of trying out Slackware. In the past, I had been scared off by all the talk I'd seen online: "Slack isn't for noobs," "Slack is for Linux experts only," etc. Now, though, instead of playing around on my daily driver, I was endeavoring to build a CLI system from scratch, so I figured "now is as good a time as any."
Lo and behold, not only was the Slackware install process the most straightforward of any distro I'd ever encountered, but the system management was slick as snot, too! A little reading here at LQ and the Slackdocs, and I was quickly being converted to a full-on Slackware enthusiast. I ended up building another BOINC box, then another...
And then, after building up several of the BOINC rigs, it finally happened: my PClinuxOS desktop was hosed after a routine update. (After rebooting, X wouldn't start.) Since I had been using this same install continually for nearly six years (PCLOS is rolling release,) I wasn't eager to change. But after some feeble attempts to roll back the update, I decided that this was some kind of a sign (from the universe or whatever) that it was time for me to start using Slackware for my GUI-based daily driver in addition to my headless CLI-only systems.
Needless to say, it worked like a charm. I now have three desktop systems running Slackware with XFCE, plus a laptop I built for a friend. My only regret is that I bought into the hype that Slackware was too "technical" and avoided it for so many years. (In fact, I find Slackware to be the easiest distro to install and use.) Looking back, I should have been on Slackware from the beginning, and now that I'm here, I'll never go back.
Many thanks to the Slackware community here at LQ. (I've turned to this site quite a lot over the last four years for both background info and answers to technical questions.) I'd also like to thank Willy Sr., R. Workman, and all the folks at SBo.
And a special thank-you to Eric H. Your tutorials/learning materials have been invaluable to me. (Firewall, repo, etc.) And I particularly want to thank you for your amazing VLC slackbuild script.
Last but not least, to Pat: a million thanks for creating (and maintaining) the best distro ever. Long live Slackware!