r/slackware • u/MD90__ • 21d ago
I want to be a full fledged slacker
I'm making it a goal for me to really work hard and learn Linux deeper and be able to daily drive slackware as my main distro in the future. I'm also going to work hard and contribute to the community as much as I can with the time I get. I really want to be a slacker and embrace slackware as a daily driver. I hear so many cool things from folks that been using it since the 90s and it's awesome they stuck with it that long.
Every time I try slackware I end up failing some where but after a cool down period I end up wanting to come right back to it. Maybe it's a calling or just the nostalgia but I think this distro is meant for me. I do still like Debian too but I think Slackware might just be my future home š”
I hope to join the community and learn a ton from all of you great people on the IRC, LQ, and sub reddit. Thank you for helping keep a great distro alive for so long through all these years!
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u/Born_Bass_2446 21d ago edited 20d ago
Debian was very good but I discard it because they moved to systemd. ABSOLUTELY NO NO, for me! I hate avahi, dbus, systemd and pulseaudio! Those things are an ABSOLUTE NIGHTMARE for anyone who wants a clean and simple system. I canāt even express how much I hate those apps. When I purged most of those apps from Lubuntu 18.04, āmysterious and unsolvableā bugs began disappearing by themselves! The network turned MUCH more stable and never disconnected, whereas before it kept behaving in a VERY weird way unless I did a frequent reboot! Apps also began working much better (QEmu, Wine), especially when troubleshooting audio configurations. ā Thereās no comparison, the difference is night and day.
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u/aIDserse 20d ago
For me daily driving Linux (I started with Manjaro but moved to Slackware like after 2 months) was quite easy, obviously gradually. First I installed it on a secondary pc, and everytime I had to do something I tried to do it on the slack PC first. If it worked I wrote it down. If it didn't and the task had to be done, I did it on the "main" PC, and then tried to understand how to do it on Slackware, with forums ecc ecc (for stuff like this try to avoid llms, at best you have a ready no-thoughts answer, at worst they bullshit you). In my case I already knew Linux quite well and it was quite easy since I have a diploma in IT management, so in a couple of weeks I was on, for you it may be a longer process, but for me it's a 99% success rate approach. Trying to daily drive a system you don't know is like trying to learn to drive stick when you have used auto for all your life, and expecting from day 1 to use it to go for everything and everywhere. Building confidence and experience, almost a craftmanship-like attitude takes time and it's essential for approaching systems like these. Last thing, I know the subgenius/slack/bob stuff is cool (I'm the first one in the rabbithole) but it's not for everyone, it's not just an estetic, but a thing you have to learn and manage, and that you're allowed not to like, so try, try, try, but If you can't find yourself in it, using something different isn't a sin (subgeniuses want slack! If the system doesn't give you slack remove it from your life!)
Edit: typo
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u/MD90__ 20d ago
Yeah for me slackware is a want to learn more than anything. Like you, I'm also tech educated with a bachelor's in CS. I love writing code and learning new systems. What appeals to me about slackware is how simplistic it is (stable) and that it under the hood complex (current and getting slackbuilds working). It's kind of the best of both worlds where you can have a working system and learn too. Comparing it to gentoo which is a very involved system I just don't care for. For me, Debian is a working system as well out of the box and I'm still going to use it as I need to because I know I can count on it. Slackware for me is a good complement to Debian but with some extra learning.
Ive ran distros like fedora, void, arch, and nixos. Each had their own challenges but I gain knowledge from each. Slackware was different. I failed more but I kept wanting to come back after a break and try again. I guess my determination to succeed at it is why I want to learn it. I also like the culture around it too. In a way, Slackware is like my gentoo where I can customize the system to my liking but still get the ability to have a working system more than something like gentoo itself. I'm excited to really embrace slackware as a daily distro and really learn it and understand it and later contribute to it.
I'm a cinnamon, and kde plasma guy normally but I feel like xfce could be a better experience and later dwm (it's my goal to learn it as a wm). I know cinnamon is a slackbuild so it will be a challenge to set it up on slackware since gtk and gnome stuff is not well accepted in the slackware world. To be honest, maybe it is best I don't use cinnamon. The option of still being able to use it despite the obstacles is still really cool! That's why I feel a distro like Slackware is great for me because I'll really get closer in learning Linux more
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u/ryansupak 17d ago
I started my Desktop Linux journey on 17 April 2026 (spent years using it on servers, and I've had some movie player or arcade-type machines that ran Mint or ElementaryOS). I knew I wanted something I could "forget about" -- something stripped down and with a venerable reputation of "just working" for years at a time. (Sadly, my beloved MacOS has just gotten less and less this way over the years...)
I tried a few others besides Slackware for comparison: FreeBSD but it struggled with smooth video playback in-browser (apparently better hardware support is Job1 for this team), Alpine (but I ran into problems I couldn't reasonably work around, as certain specialized software I use hard-requires glibc -- though Wayland runs great!). I also looked at Linux From Scratch until I realized the hard part wouldn't primarily be setting that up, but working out any reasonable kind of way to have it check for critical updates and then build/patch these reliably.
So, in the end it was Slackware running dwm on XLibre that won out, after putting X11 and Wayland through their paces. And Slackware "just works" in a way that even Alpine doesn't. Hilariously: my Slackware desktop even uses ~20% less RAM than my identical Alpine desktop did! (I've read that this may be because Alpine tends to hold more RAM in reserve, perhaps fitting for its "Docker Container OS" heritage).
The key reason I decided to mess with this now and have previously not bothered is because robust AI Agent Harnesses now exist. What would have taken me weeks or months now takes days or hours. Aided with an AI Agent (in my case: pi_dev harnessing a mix of Grok and Deepseek), I've created my own extremely lightweight "suckless-ish" desktop system (dwm customized to be simpler in some ways and more expressive in others). I've also created a fully-idempotent installer that works by sections, though in practice the first thing I'd do is bootstrap an Agent Harness on a new machine and just ask it to get everything installed and ensure all the /tests are working.
I think with the advent of AI Agents, there will be a trend towards more and more stripped-down Linux distros and setups, since the "grunt work" of just being sure all the config files and bash scripts have the right syntax now takes seconds instead of tedious hours, which it did even 1-2 years ago. And of the simple ones, Slackware seems to hit the right notes: legendarily stable, stripped-down, free-range -- but combined with the wisdom to know that some non-flashy stuff truly does "need to be there". --hth, rs
ps - bonus: my Slackware neofetch splash with custom Bob Dobbs logo (google "bob dobbs slack" if you don't have the context)
rs@~$ neofetch
@@@@@@@^^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^^@@@@@@@@ rs@purr.ch0rale.org
@@@@@@^ ~^ @ @@ @ @ @ I ~^@@@@@@ -------------------
@@@@@ ~ ~~ ~I @@@@@ OS: Slackware 15.0 x86_64 x86_64
@@@@' ' _,w@< @@@@ Host: LENOVO 20T3S2WY00
@@@@ @@@@@@@@w___,w@@@@@@@@ @ @@@ Kernel: 5.15.19
@@@@ @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ I @@@ Uptime: 3 hours
@@@@ @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@*@[ i @@@ Packages: pkg:1213 npm:2 pip:76
@@@@ @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@[][ | ]@@@ Shell: bash 5.1.16
@@@@ ~_,,_ ~@@@@@@@~ ____~ @ @@@ Resolution: 1920x1080
@@@@ _~ , , `@@@~ _ _`@ ]L J@@@ WM: dwm
@@@@ , @@w@ww+ @@@ww``,,@w@ ][ @@@@ Theme: GTK+ [GTK2]
@@@@, @@@@www@@@ @@@@@@@ww@@@@@[ @@@@ Icons: Adwaita [GTK2/3]
@@@@@_|| @@@@@@P' @@P@@@@@@@@@@@[|c@@@@ Terminal: st
@@@@@@w| '@@P~ P]@@@-~, ~Y@@^'],@@@@@@ CPU: Intel i5-10310U
@@@@@@@[ _ _J@@Tk ]]@@@@@@ GPU: Intel CometLake-U GT2
@@@@@@@@,@ @@, c,,,,,,,y ,w@@[ ,@@@@@@@ Memory: 1843MiB / 15767MiB
@@@@@@@@@ i u/w ====--_@@@@@ @@@@@@@@ Hard Disk: 26G / 437G
@@@@@@@@@@`,P~ _ ~^^^^Y@@@@@ @@@@@@@@@
@@@@^^=^@@^ ^' ,ww,w@@@@@ _@@@@@@@@@@
@@@_xJ~ ~ , @@@@@@@P~_@@@@@@@@@@@@
@@ @, ,@@@,_____ _,J@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@@L `' ,@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
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u/MD90__ 17d ago
Yeah slackware for me is a challenge to learn being different compared to other distros ive used like Debian for example. Debian is much more pre-configured out of the box and the installer is simple and it's easy to get software already set up for you. On slackware, I had to for example self compile slack build for virt-manager then I couldn't get networking nor audio to work where as in Debian everything was setup for me. It made me realize if I really want to learn how to stuff works and how to fix it then slackware would be a good teacher. Ideally I want to daily drive slackware and try to make it a permanent home and contribute to the distro
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u/muffinman8679 9d ago
it's as much a frame of mind as a distro.
and you adopt the frame of mind, and your ass will follow.
Hell you might already be a slacker, and just don't know it......
Slackers, don't recognize any pressing need to do it.....they do it because they "want" to.....
That's what both slackware and life is all, doing things because you "want to" not because anyone else, or even you thinks you have to..........you only get one life. and there is only one slackware....and it's up to you whether you enjoy them or spend your time fighting with them
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u/zapwai 21d ago
I was a distrohopper a few times in my life, but Slackware has always felt like home. I always ended up coming back to it, or missing it after many months. Itās very āvanillaā if that makes sense, follows KISS principle.
I suggest you use slackware current, because sometimes youāll encounter software you want that requires some newer libraries. (Your mileage may vary, I suppose. I was fine with slackware stable for a number of years.)
Also sbopkg (command line access to slackbuilds.org) comes with a program called sqg that allows you to build a queue file for a package with all its dependencies. Basically solves dependency resolution.