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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ubuntu desktops releases I mean are more visually nice on install, Debian needs more configuration after install.
Both are basically the same, just the Configuration for Mate looks better on install for the desktop distros of ubuntu.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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:
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Most of those are warnings like "the attribute you've used from back when HTML was slim and fast is obsolete, please use this slower modern thing instead". I doubt that's making the page slow. Only a few are actual errors.
I'm very curious what modern Slackware is like in practice, given their philosophy and guidance listed in http://www.slackware.com/info/