[HN Gopher] Slackware 15.0 release candidate one
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Slackware 15.0 release candidate one
Author : Tomte
Score : 107 points
Date : 2021-08-16 18:25 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.slackware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.slackware.com)
| IronWolve wrote:
| 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.
| vergessenmir wrote:
| 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.
| sildur wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >> 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.
| fullstop wrote:
| I spent a few months downloading the floppy sets at night just
| to find out that my SCSI card was not supported.
| mikewave wrote:
| The Subgenius must have Slack.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| Repent! Quit your job! Slack off! And Praise "Bob"!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt9MP70ODNw
| q-rews wrote:
| Now there's a name I hadn't heard in 20 years. I thought I had
| something to do with Winamp at first read.
| syncsynchalt wrote:
| 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/
| cyphax wrote:
| 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).
| throwaway47292 wrote:
| 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
| bdcravens wrote:
| Don't remember the version, but it was mine as well, around
| 1998. I still remember setting up all the feature-specific
| floppies.
| silisili wrote:
| 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.
| t3lp3r10n wrote:
| 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.
| bstamour wrote:
| 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.
| shmoe wrote:
| dude.. me too.. imaging the rainbow boot disk. Or was it color?
| now I have to check :P
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| 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.
| _trampeltier wrote:
| Also Slackware 3.0 here. It was on a CD on my first Linux book.
| 95 or 96 i also would guess.
| smhenderson wrote:
| 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_
| corentin88 wrote:
| Would be great that HN points out unsecured links (i.e. not
| HTTPS)
| modshatereality wrote:
| If you're scared go to church.
| hitpointdrew wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| beermonster wrote:
| Ah, making a boot and root floppy using rawwrite. Brings back
| fond memories. Slackware still has a place in my heart :-)
| [deleted]
| metalliqaz wrote:
| 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
| xuhu wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| lrem wrote:
| Firefox on a Surface Pro deals with it just fine.
| slim wrote:
| Could be. Html is full of errors https://validator.w3.org/nu/
| ?doc=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slackware....
| pavon wrote:
| 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.
| s_dev wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jmclnx wrote:
| 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.
| :)
| readingnews wrote:
| 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!
| klyrs wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Nearly all of my complaints about i3wm evaporated when I
| switched over to using Sway.
| klyrs wrote:
| Okay, I'll bite. What didn't you like about i3 and/or what
| does Sway do better?
| markstos wrote:
| 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=XServ
| er-...
| MisterTea wrote:
| 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.
| ujeezy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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._
| cholmon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| For something as significant as an operating system, please
| always check the gpg signatures. Do not rely on transport
| security.
| lightbulbjim wrote:
| Plus the downloads are served by mirrors and torrents
| anyway.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| But, does it run systemd?
| pwg wrote:
| It does not.
| evilDagmar wrote:
| Have we seen any news about Patrick having a catastrophic
| aneurysm?
| syncsynchalt wrote:
| No. I can think of nothing more aligned with Slackware
| philosophy than staying on rc.d
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(page generated 2021-08-16 23:01 UTC)