My first Linux was in 1998 (when I was in 9th grade) and I think my first distro was RedHat, but then my boyfriend at the time told me Slackware was better so I quickly switched. Like others in this thread, I learned so much from Slackware.
I eventually moved to Debian and its derivatives and now I only use Linux in a docker container or in a VM, but I’ll always look back on that time in my life fondly b/c it’s what shaped the basis for so much of my computing life. My career as an adult has had lots of pivots, but I can confidently say that I wouldn’t have my current day job if it weren’t for all the stuff being a Slackware user taught me 20 years ago.
This sounds so much like me. Please tell me you ordered RedHat CDs from CheapBytes as well!
I took a bit of an odd path after Slackware, running OpenBSD as a desktop OS. I used Window Maker, and one tangential benefit was that none of my friends knew how to use my computer, so couldn't muck around with it much.
Same here, started with Slackware 2.0 in 1996, already knew other UNIX systems given that I was a bit further along (at the university).
It was Slackware that gave me the opportunity to play with something UNIX like at home, but then as UI/UX focused developer I followed a different path of desktop friendly distributions, Red-Hat, Mandrake, SuSE, Ubuntu, to eventually settle in Windows/OS X on desktop systems.
But yeah, learned a lot. Knowing Linux deeply helped getting some of the projects that worked as jumping stone for something else.
Slackware was my first introduction to Linux. I initially investigated it as a way to get around my parents setting a password on Windows. Thanks, mom and dad, for the (very unintentional) motivation that set me on the career path I'm on now.
IMHO, Slackware is close to the local maximum in the space of imperative distros. I think adding dependency resolution is the only thing it misses vs Arch or Void. But like those, it's barebones and it ships simple lean binary packages. Going back to Slackware was a brisk of fresh air when Ubuntu and friends got too complex. Sometimes things break, and it's hard to understand why due to the overwhelming amount of things they ship with.
There's nothing like having total control of what you are running, and Slackware is really good at this.
I think the future are functional distributions like NixOS or GuixSD. For many use cases, they are just ready for prime time. For others (e.g. R or Julia), where heavy patching / wrapping of packages is needed, there's still a bit of work to be done.
Same here! I recall my dad complaining that it was causing issues to windows when dual booting when I was a teenager. But damn getting a modem working in that era was tremendous bitch.
You were lucky that you only knew Windows and had concerned parents.
At around the same time I had people show me various flavours of Linux with great enthusiasm. I was supposed to be impressed but I had SGI Irix plus applications for it. From my perspective I could not see the point of this 'toy operating system'. It was a bit like one of those cloned Chinese cars that we used to laugh about, with stupid names for programs that were sensibly named in real UNIX.
As a consequence I missed the boat and only started with Linux when Ubuntu came along.
Happy Anniversary! Like others here, Slackware was my first distro. I called it out in a blog post of mine a long time ago:
"All the “legit” people were using Linux so I spent a week downloading the different packages for a Slackware install and put them all on 3.5” floppies only to have the install fail. I should mention that up until this point I had basically zero Linux experience. Luckily for me there was Cheap Bytes which was a site that would burn everything to a CD and mail it to you for a small fee. A few weeks later that old 133Mhz Windows 95 computer was a lean and mean Linux box. I can still remember the panic when I saw that “darkstar login” prompt come up. What the hell had I done? As I said earlier, I was all in."
The floppy method failed me because I had bought 50 unbranded floppies at what I thought was a bargain price. But it turned out they weren't reliable at high density.
Switching to a different brand meant my only remaining problems were:
- the time it took to install by switching out all those floppies
- having to wait overnight for a kernel recompile whenever I added new hardware (not that often, but the memory is strong because those were the exact times I didn't want to have to wait)
- not really knowing why I wanted to use Linux, apart from thinking it would be cool to have a web server running in my room (this was back in 1994)
Haha, I had a similar download experience. I had to track someone down who had a CD-R drive (pretty sure it was the guy that introduced to me to Slackware) to get it running because the floppy method failed me!
Oh, the memories. Like many others in this thread, Slackware was my first. I still smile thinking about the bootstrapping process I managed to figure out (I was ~12 years old at the time). We didn't have much money, which meant we didn't have a whole bunch of floppy disks laying around. I managed to scrounge up enough of them to get the A series and a subset of the N series (just enough for PPP and FTP). Once I got a working setup, I dialed into our ISP and slowly downloaded extras until I had a usable system. First X, and then a graphical browser, and then the rest. Fond fond memories.
Indeed happy anniversary, congrats, and thanks to Patrick Volkerding and crew.
I'm leaning towards FreeBSD lately, and when it's Linux at work it's necessarily RHEL due to company standardization etc, but Slackware is where the heart is, and will always be.
I used FreeBSD on a laptop for a year. The only problem was suspend/resume which I never got going. When I mention this people say they have gotten it working, so probably it's me failing at it. But if I knew I could get it working, I'd switch back without giving it a second thought, by far the best experience using a Unixy OS I had so far.
Pretty sure Slackware was the first or second Linux distribution that I tried while I was still in High School in the States. I was attracted to it because it was simple and straightforward, with the packages consisting of tarballs and the distributed packages being very close to vanilla with a minimum of distro patching or customization. It was easier to build stuff on. Didn't hurt that it was relatively svelte, either. I had a terrible connection (33.6 kbps).
My thanks for all their efforts. I learned a lot about Linux from playing around (poorly) with the distro. We've come a long way since then (the 90's). Happy Anniversary!
My 1st linux distro back on 1998 (when I was 16) was Slackware 3.6 with a Linux 2.0.36 kernel. I remember I had a 33.6 kbps modem and downloaded it floppy by floppy. The distro was seperated in letter named packages and you could download only what you needed (iirc it was 'a' for the core system, 'd' for development gcc et al, 'x' for x windows etc).
Slackware had a very nice and straight forward installation procedure considering I was 16 at that time and all comcepts were self learned.
The 'package' manager was as simple as possible: packages were tgz files that were just unzipped to /.
The real problems I had was with my (ISA) sound card and my modem: I rember that I had to boot windows first for the sound card to set up and get the proper IRQ/DMA and them hot reboot to linux. For the modem because of how the telecom provided in Greece worked (no dialtone) I had to configure it to use ATX3DT instead of ATDT to call a number.
All these took me weeks of research but were resolved to great excitement!
Finally, after a couple of months using linux and accessing various IRC channels through the cool BitchX client I executed an innocent looking binary I was sent over. I was running everything as root of course...
You probably can understand what happend then :/
Although I knew (some) of the risks of executing binary acquired binaries in Windows I thought that with linux I was invincible. The good thing was that I noticed strange commands in the root's history (the attacker wasnt that good after all) and I immediately formatted the drive.
That incident kept me away from linux for a couple of years until I felt more confident for my security skills!
When I downloaded it, painfully over a 57.6k modem using zmodem, I remember all the notes about slack and the church of Bob. At the time, 1993 or so, there was no Wikipedia, so it was a bit hard for a naive high school kid to figure out that there was actually no religious connotation. I never did get the hang of slack or slackware, but it got me on the path to where I am.
My earliest memory of Linux is a bunch of dark blue 3.5 inch disks that I used to install Slackware from. I think that GCC required additional 4 disks and X 6 of them? Good times.
Slackware and 3.5 inch disks for me too. If I remember correctly, I was going to install SLS Linux but this "Slackware" thing was the new hotness. Time flies having fun I guess. Still running Linux on my workstation.
Slackware 2.0 required several of them, or in alternative dump them into the hard disk on an MS-DOS partition and point the installer to the location.
There were CD-ROM variants, but this was about the time EIDE support was still being added, so only those lucky SCSI owners could actually take advantage of it.
Congratulations to Patrick and all the package maintainers and contributors! I've been a happy Slackware user for like 18 years or so, and eagerly awaiting Slackware 15!
So many fond memories! Unlike many here, Slackware was not my first distro. I had tried Mandrake first, then RedHat, then grew more and more uncomfortable with their packaging system, and after a brief stint with Gentoo (admittedly, it was too early for my skills, back then) I met Slackware. It was love at first sight.
It was lean, nimble, skeletal almost. No frills, just perfect. My Athlon just flew with it - something I would never experience with Mandrake or RedHat! The (lovely) price to pay was that you would have to learn more about the internals. I would pay that price time and again!
And though I eventually moved to Debian (because, again, of the packaging system) I very fondly admit Slackware was my first true love.
If anyone is still monitoring this thread, it transpires that Patrick Volkerding, the BDFL and main developer of Slackware, is having financial problems.
Moderators: I think this story would be of interest to HNers because of its similarities with the OpenBSD situation some years ago, and the issue of how to fund open source/free software projects generally
Wow, time flies doesn't it? That was my first intro to Linux - installing on a 386 I think. Compiling stuff to get the sound card and CDROM working. Lots and LOTS of learning.
And finally, when it all worked - playing DOOM which actually performed better than on Windows.
Great (and not so great) memories of downloading floppy images from A-Z? Writing them to disk, trying to get X to work, then installing openlook and later CDE to pretend I had a Sun at my desk. May have been '94 or so. :-D
TIL that Slackware is about five months older than me. I was a distro geek in my teens, and Slackware, together with Gentoo, is on of the two distros that I never got working. Is there any concrete advantages to using it today?
> Is there any concrete advantages to using it today?
As a new slackware user, I see the following advantages
1. no systemd
2. really minimal bare system: running htop shows less than 10 processes running (including those of root)
3. simple package management with no dependencies: a "package" is just a tgz file that you decompress into your filesystem
4. very up to date binary packages (e.g., there are just few days between the release of a new gcc version and its availability as a slackware package).
I have spent most on my life on debian and ubuntu, and I cannot imagine going back to them. Other distributions that I like are voidlinux (but unfortunately it has automatic package dependences, that limit my freedom too much) and dragonflybsd, which has also very modern packages.
Concrete advantages, I'm not sure there are any, unless it'd be its relative simplicity. It's my preferred Linux-based OS, and has been for 18 years (I also ran Ubuntu for a few years for a desktop, but went back to Slack). I really like that it adheres to the principles behind it, and it's super nice that it doesn't change between releases, so it always feels right at home, if it's a brand spankin' new release. And the combination of many official packages plus SBo means it's about as useful as other distributions.
In college, I was the SA of a small dialup ISP. Two PCs running Slackware, a Livingston port-master, a T1, and about two dozen Hayes modems. I probably still have the install CD in a box somewhere.
Yup, first taste of Linux was Slackware too. We ran it on a 486 which was our University webserver for us and our friends. I still wonder what happened to that box.
I've moved on to MacOS for work and Arch Linux for home but Slackware will always have a special place as my intro to Linux and understanding what actually goes on beneath the surface on a computer.
I can't count the number of late-night hours I spent in high school learning about Linux and playing DroidBattles on a second-hand, beat-up Toshiba Portégé running Slackware.
[+] [-] filmgirlcw|7 years ago|reply
I eventually moved to Debian and its derivatives and now I only use Linux in a docker container or in a VM, but I’ll always look back on that time in my life fondly b/c it’s what shaped the basis for so much of my computing life. My career as an adult has had lots of pivots, but I can confidently say that I wouldn’t have my current day job if it weren’t for all the stuff being a Slackware user taught me 20 years ago.
Happy 25th, Slackware!
[+] [-] nivenzo|7 years ago|reply
I took a bit of an odd path after Slackware, running OpenBSD as a desktop OS. I used Window Maker, and one tangential benefit was that none of my friends knew how to use my computer, so couldn't muck around with it much.
[+] [-] pjmlp|7 years ago|reply
It was Slackware that gave me the opportunity to play with something UNIX like at home, but then as UI/UX focused developer I followed a different path of desktop friendly distributions, Red-Hat, Mandrake, SuSE, Ubuntu, to eventually settle in Windows/OS X on desktop systems.
But yeah, learned a lot. Knowing Linux deeply helped getting some of the projects that worked as jumping stone for something else.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sjs382|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nextos|7 years ago|reply
IMHO, Slackware is close to the local maximum in the space of imperative distros. I think adding dependency resolution is the only thing it misses vs Arch or Void. But like those, it's barebones and it ships simple lean binary packages. Going back to Slackware was a brisk of fresh air when Ubuntu and friends got too complex. Sometimes things break, and it's hard to understand why due to the overwhelming amount of things they ship with.
There's nothing like having total control of what you are running, and Slackware is really good at this.
I think the future are functional distributions like NixOS or GuixSD. For many use cases, they are just ready for prime time. For others (e.g. R or Julia), where heavy patching / wrapping of packages is needed, there's still a bit of work to be done.
[+] [-] paulie_a|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Theodores|7 years ago|reply
At around the same time I had people show me various flavours of Linux with great enthusiasm. I was supposed to be impressed but I had SGI Irix plus applications for it. From my perspective I could not see the point of this 'toy operating system'. It was a bit like one of those cloned Chinese cars that we used to laugh about, with stupid names for programs that were sensibly named in real UNIX.
As a consequence I missed the boat and only started with Linux when Ubuntu came along.
[+] [-] johnnycarcin|7 years ago|reply
"All the “legit” people were using Linux so I spent a week downloading the different packages for a Slackware install and put them all on 3.5” floppies only to have the install fail. I should mention that up until this point I had basically zero Linux experience. Luckily for me there was Cheap Bytes which was a site that would burn everything to a CD and mail it to you for a small fee. A few weeks later that old 133Mhz Windows 95 computer was a lean and mean Linux box. I can still remember the panic when I saw that “darkstar login” prompt come up. What the hell had I done? As I said earlier, I was all in."
[+] [-] rahimnathwani|7 years ago|reply
Switching to a different brand meant my only remaining problems were:
- the time it took to install by switching out all those floppies
- having to wait overnight for a kernel recompile whenever I added new hardware (not that often, but the memory is strong because those were the exact times I didn't want to have to wait)
- not really knowing why I wanted to use Linux, apart from thinking it would be cool to have a web server running in my room (this was back in 1994)
[+] [-] filmgirlcw|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonyarkles|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gruturo|7 years ago|reply
I'm leaning towards FreeBSD lately, and when it's Linux at work it's necessarily RHEL due to company standardization etc, but Slackware is where the heart is, and will always be.
[+] [-] kev009|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gkya|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lithiumfrost|7 years ago|reply
My thanks for all their efforts. I learned a lot about Linux from playing around (poorly) with the distro. We've come a long way since then (the 90's). Happy Anniversary!
[+] [-] spapas82|7 years ago|reply
Slackware had a very nice and straight forward installation procedure considering I was 16 at that time and all comcepts were self learned.
The 'package' manager was as simple as possible: packages were tgz files that were just unzipped to /.
The real problems I had was with my (ISA) sound card and my modem: I rember that I had to boot windows first for the sound card to set up and get the proper IRQ/DMA and them hot reboot to linux. For the modem because of how the telecom provided in Greece worked (no dialtone) I had to configure it to use ATX3DT instead of ATDT to call a number.
All these took me weeks of research but were resolved to great excitement!
Finally, after a couple of months using linux and accessing various IRC channels through the cool BitchX client I executed an innocent looking binary I was sent over. I was running everything as root of course...
You probably can understand what happend then :/
Although I knew (some) of the risks of executing binary acquired binaries in Windows I thought that with linux I was invincible. The good thing was that I noticed strange commands in the root's history (the attacker wasnt that good after all) and I immediately formatted the drive.
That incident kept me away from linux for a couple of years until I felt more confident for my security skills!
[+] [-] jimmyswimmy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] praptak|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nas|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] schoen|7 years ago|reply
http://www.slackware.com/install/softwaresets.php
[+] [-] noonespecial|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmlp|7 years ago|reply
There were CD-ROM variants, but this was about the time EIDE support was still being added, so only those lucky SCSI owners could actually take advantage of it.
[+] [-] cyphax|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Koshkin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] varlock|7 years ago|reply
It was lean, nimble, skeletal almost. No frills, just perfect. My Athlon just flew with it - something I would never experience with Mandrake or RedHat! The (lovely) price to pay was that you would have to learn more about the internals. I would pay that price time and again!
And though I eventually moved to Debian (because, again, of the packaging system) I very fondly admit Slackware was my first true love.
Thanks for all you taught me, Slackware.
[+] [-] keithpeter|7 years ago|reply
and
https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/donati...
If anyone is still monitoring this thread, it transpires that Patrick Volkerding, the BDFL and main developer of Slackware, is having financial problems.
Moderators: I think this story would be of interest to HNers because of its similarities with the OpenBSD situation some years ago, and the issue of how to fund open source/free software projects generally
[+] [-] acutesoftware|7 years ago|reply
And finally, when it all worked - playing DOOM which actually performed better than on Windows.
[+] [-] TomMarius|7 years ago|reply
EDIT: Wow, Wine is really old.
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gkya|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enriquto|7 years ago|reply
As a new slackware user, I see the following advantages
1. no systemd
2. really minimal bare system: running htop shows less than 10 processes running (including those of root)
3. simple package management with no dependencies: a "package" is just a tgz file that you decompress into your filesystem
4. very up to date binary packages (e.g., there are just few days between the release of a new gcc version and its availability as a slackware package).
I have spent most on my life on debian and ubuntu, and I cannot imagine going back to them. Other distributions that I like are voidlinux (but unfortunately it has automatic package dependences, that limit my freedom too much) and dragonflybsd, which has also very modern packages.
[+] [-] cyphax|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] js2|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] classichasclass|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vmlinuz|7 years ago|reply
I did throw out the last of my floppies many years ago, though!
[+] [-] rok3|7 years ago|reply
I've moved on to MacOS for work and Arch Linux for home but Slackware will always have a special place as my intro to Linux and understanding what actually goes on beneath the surface on a computer.
I can't count the number of late-night hours I spent in high school learning about Linux and playing DroidBattles on a second-hand, beat-up Toshiba Portégé running Slackware.