[HN Gopher] Slax: Live Pocket Linux
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       Slax: Live Pocket Linux
        
       Author : Ulf950
       Score  : 62 points
       Date   : 2025-12-08 12:24 UTC (5 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.slax.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.slax.org)
        
       | system7rocks wrote:
       | I love the idea of this... but here is what I want - IT SHOULD
       | WORK WITH EVERY HARDWARE PERMUTATION KNOWN TO EXISTENCE. If
       | not... combine your energy with Fedora.
        
         | unsungNovelty wrote:
         | The IBM <> Red Hat <> Test horse which can ditch you at a
         | second's notice like centos? No thanks.
         | 
         | You should invest into a community run or community oriented
         | distros like Arch, Gentoo, Alpine, Linux Mint etc.
         | 
         | More over, each distro has its things. Why should Slax do that?
        
           | graemep wrote:
           | I do not agree with the parent, however the first part of
           | your objection is not really valid. Red Hat were able to
           | ditch Centos because they owned it. You canbase something
           | independent on RH.
        
             | LeFantome wrote:
             | What drives me personally nuts about the CentOS saga is all
             | the "community" hand-waving about creating a bit for bit
             | clone of a distro.
             | 
             | There can be no "community just shipping builds of RHEL
             | code as, by definition, you cannot change anything. That
             | means you cannot contribute. In my view, an Open Source
             | "community" cannot just be people that use things for free.
             | It is supposed to be about collaborating to build things.
             | 
             | At least now we have Alma Linux which strives to be ABI
             | compatible with RHEL but builds it themselves from CentOS
             | Stream. They actually build something. They can actually
             | contribute (and they do). They can innovate. For example,
             | they have continued the x86-64v2 builds even though RHEL
             | has abandoned them. On Alma, you can at least claim to be
             | building a community.
             | 
             | I do not use any of these distros by the way, in case you
             | think I am shilling something.
        
       | butz wrote:
       | While last update is from October 2023, I'm still surprised that
       | this project is still going for so long. Remember using Slax
       | almost a decade ago.
        
       | i_v wrote:
       | Slax brings back fond memories! I used to boot school computers
       | into it to have access to OpenOffice, Firefox, _ahem_ Ophcrack...
       | 
       | I never ran Slackware Linux beyond that but the simplicity of
       | being able to build a custom live USB through their web interface
       | was amazing. I don't think I'd have gotten as much of a head
       | start with Linux had it not existed.
        
       | mongrelion wrote:
       | This brings back good memories.
       | 
       | When I was in college I didn't have my own computer so I relied
       | on the Windows machines from the library.
       | 
       | That's when I discovered Slax and Puppy Linux [1] and all its
       | different variants. Such a beautiful thing to boot into these
       | pendrive distros and discover the world of Linux through them
       | without altering the host system.
       | 
       | Good times.
       | 
       | [1] https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/
        
       | sombragris wrote:
       | I used it sometimes when I needed a live Linux, and I liked it,
       | because it used to be based in Slackware, and it had KDE as its
       | desktop. Now they added Debian as another base, and that's great.
       | Sadly, they dropped KDE.
       | 
       | There's also Porteus, also a Slackware derivative offering KDE
       | Plasma -- https://www.porteus.org
       | 
       | Slax was and still is a great live distribution. The fact that
       | (at least one of its flavors) is based on Slackware shows that
       | the parent distro (Slackware) isn't that hard to use, something
       | that few people believe. Slackware is in fact very simple in
       | comparison to other distros.
        
       | TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
       | This makes me miss the days of Knoppix. Apparently it's less dead
       | than I thought, it did have a new release in April 2021 (and it
       | was distributed on a DVD with certain magazines, like the old
       | days!) http://www.knoppix.org
        
       | dahngue wrote:
       | You can also just literally install most any linux distro to a
       | USB and use it the same way. It likely won't work on every
       | machine, but it will work on most similar machines. I have done
       | so for many years with archlinux
        
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       (page generated 2025-12-13 23:01 UTC)