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Savannah - M6 Mark II

Started 7 months ago | Photos thread
dan the man p Senior Member • Posts: 1,201
Re: 3rd Set (Cathedral of St. John and Shrimp Factory)

RLight wrote:

Never heard of Slackware…

Why would one prefer Slackware for personal work? I should add I write my own shell; CLI or forks are just fine here.

Slackware is actually the oldest surviving Linux distribution. It has a reputation for being difficult to use, which I don't think is wholly justified, at least not anymore. I like it because it is stable and very easy to adjust to your liking by creating your own software packages or modifying official ones. For example, to enable CR3 support in ART, I first rebuilt the exiv2 package enabling an option that is disabled by default due to patent concerns. Then I built ART from source. (None of this should be necessary if using one of the official builds, by the way.) You could certainly do this sort of thing in other distros too, but it often takes more fighting against the auto-dependency-resolving package manager. The flip side of this, and the reason people consider it hard, is that package management works very differently from most other distros. There is no automatic dependency resolution; you're supposed to install mostly everything to avoid such issues. That's not actually as bad as it sounds, because "everything" is a lot less than most other distros, and most other software you may need can be obtained from a secondary source-based repository called SlackBuilds.org that does include dependency resolution. The other reason for its reputation is that system administration is pretty much all CLI based.

All that is more work than most people are looking for, but I find the flexibility very useful at times. Plus, after using it for 6 years, I have a lot of inertia and don't really want to switch to something else.

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