I have been using Slackware properly for about two weeks now. Not the timid dual-boot dabbling I did last year — I mean as the only thing booting on the machine, with no Windows escape hatch left.
A fortnight is not enough to write a guide. It is enough to have an opinion.
What I expected versus what I got
I expected an obscure, painful Linux. The reputation around Slackware is that it is stripped back, that it does not hold your hand, and that everything is your problem. All of that is true. None of it is the bad thing the reputation makes it sound like.
What I got was a system where I can actually trace what happens when it boots. /etc/rc.d is a directory of shell scripts. They run in order. They are short enough to read in an afternoon. There is no second layer of abstraction telling those scripts what to do — they are the configuration. After three years of being mystified by the Windows registry, this is the kind of plainness that feels almost rude.
The package system, which everyone complains about
Slackware's package format is a tarball with a small install script. There is no dependency resolution. People say this like it is a damning indictment.
It is, sometimes. I have already managed to install a thing that needed a library I did not have, and the thing failed to run. The thing did not, however, drag in seventeen unrelated packages without telling me, and it did not refuse to install over a perceived conflict that turned out to be wrong.
The trade-off is real but I think I prefer this side of it. I would rather find out a dependency is missing by reading an error message than have a package manager guess for me and be wrong.
What I have actually built
In two weeks the machine has become:
- A web server, briefly, until I realised I had no idea what I was exposing.
- A mail-getting box for a couple of accounts via fetchmail and procmail, which I am still bewildered by.
- A place where I can compile things, which is the actual point.
makeis genuinely the headline feature.
The bit I did not see coming
The thing I did not expect was how much running this kind of system would change my reading habits. I now actually open /usr/share/doc files. I read manual pages instead of fishing for tutorials. The system is, at every layer, designed to be readable, and once you accept that you have to read it, the time it takes to get anything done collapses.
Next time I expect I will write about firewalling, because the day after I started exposing services I started reading ipfwadm documentation, and it has not been short reading.