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I do hate this defetist attitude. You use Debian without systemd (I do). You can turn to Devuan Or Slackware. In any case, if you characterize yourself as "professional", contribute to one of those options if you want to keep systemd-free Linux distros viable, instead of whining.

That's how it works around here.

hope your happy "freedom advocates". Remember XP requires just a Pentium and 64MB RAM.

Slackware only needs a 486 and 64MB. With 128MB and WindowMaker, the system purrs for the most part. Of course, that's not my daily driver.

... slow release schedule?

What are you talking about? Latest Ubuntu has gcc 4.8.5. Last release of Slackware has 5.3 (-current has 8.1.1)

It often surprises me how much Ubuntu lags in package versions behind Slackware.

Slackware introduced Pulseaudio recently, and if I'm going to run Linux at all, it'll be Poettering-free. So far they've rejected systemd at least, but I don't think they can hold out much longer on that front, since all the major desktop environments have been co-opted by now.

Running Slackware without pulseaudio is supported. Slackware provides a basic series of packages which are pulseaudio-free and the instructions to setup a pulseaudio-free system are fairly easy.

Thankfully some other distros have ignored that and the dreaded systemd disease.

It's great to see a systemd-free distro making progress. Hope they keep releasing.

And remember, Slackware is the oldest GNU/Linux distro in active maintenance, and is also free of systemd. Even the development version (Slackware-current) has no systemd.

Hehe, of course, unicode doesn't "run" strictly speaking, please read what I just replied above.

Furthermore, the systems I was talking about happily run UTF-8 compatible web application like Slashdot could be. There is no need to run my root shell with UTF-8 support although for my use cases so why should I enable UTF-8 support for my root shell and daemons? Why should I make UTF-8 system wide default?

It means that the system can do UTF-8 but it uses LANG=en_US by default and it expects its configuration files to be en_US.

See here for further details:
https://docs.slackware.com/sla...

It means that the system can do UTF-8 but it uses LANG=en_US by default and it expects its configuration files to be en_US.

See here for further details:
https://docs.slackware.com/sla...

Just kidding, of course.

But if you want to try, here it is, Slackware 7.1

Phew!!

Snap ,slack, get back.......just gimme a command line.
  I don't mean to whine, but I'm a hack.
  I like my computing to be simple.
  No candy because of the pimple.
None of this GUI for the dandy.
I mean to compute and calculate.
Because this fancy shit is to masturbate.
That is it.

oh come on! Everybody knows Slack == Slackware Linux
http://slackware.com/

In that case, slackware also have almost all the old distro versions available since release

https://mirrors.slackware.com/...

notice that the 1.0.1 have the 2009 date because it was re-uploaded at that time... the release notes are from 1993-08-04 08:33:56 PST

being one of the oldest distros and the oldest still alive... it will be hard to beat that :D

Linux, back in the day, originally ran on 486 processors, and ran well. You could boot the system off 1.44 MB floppy disks and it booted in well under 11 minutes.
Why reinvent the wheel and compile a modern linux when OG distros are still available - like Slack 1.01 from Feb 1995.
Download all 13 floppy disk images (less than 20 MB!) from here: https://mirrors.slackware.com/....

With only hobbyist Linux distros now not forcing systemd on me, I've been forced to move to FreeBSD. It wasn't Microsoft that made me ditch Linux; it was the Linux community itself that did that.

Red Hat was patient zero, and infected both Arch and Debian.
Ubuntu contracted it from Debian.
Mint contracted it from Ubuntu.

There are quarantine zones where systemd dare not tread, and the number of survivors who reach them grows daily.

There are several great Linux distros without systemd:
Devuan (a fork; Debian without systemd)
Gobolinux
Void Linux

And of course the old guard distros that had natural immunity to systemd:
Gentoo
Slackware

Don't give up on Linux. It is more crucial than ever to group with other systemd survivors and lend support to those who still need to be evacuated from the contaminated distros.

Just like always. You gotta problem?

I don't, but this guy — and all of the adoring moderators of his — might:

In the debate about file sharing, please speak up for the legal uses of it.

That's what I tried to do today, and what did I get?..

Just like always. You gotta problem?

You sound just like an apple fan boy. I have noticed similarities between both. Not that I don't like BSD, on the contrary.

link:
http://www.slackware.com/

How about Got Slack -- https://store.slackware.com/cg... :)

It is about money.

From Mark Shuttleworth's Dec 1st post (Mark Shuttleworth is the founder of Ubuntu. He’s also the Executive Chairman and VP, Product Strategy at Canonical)

More importantly, as users, you can vote with your feet to any significant cloud and have confidence that what you are using won’t bite you hard in the weekend.

Someone did not pay to be on that list, and they are not happy about their success. Ubuntu could not have a less accurate name.

Let's see, does Slackware or FreeBSD have similarly titled self-important twats at the helm?

Nope... Slackware has a "Founder and Project Coordinator": http://www.slackware.com/about/
FreeBSD has "Executive" and "Marketing" directors: https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/about/staff/ (not so good, bit like Ubuntu there)

I think Shuttleworth needs a major dose of "don't be a greedy dick" medicine.

The 4.6 kernel series is already end of life, 4.7 is only marked stable, and 4.8 hasn't yet been released.. Currently Linux Kernel 4.4 is the latest longterm Linux kernel and is projected to be supported until Feb. 2018. With the exception of kernel 3.2, support will end for the other Linux longterm kernels either this year or next year.

If you are creating a long term support release of a Linux distro, it makes sense to choose a longterm support kernel over either an EOL kernel release or an unreleased kernel (which likely bring its own set of issues). If the distro did choose to kernel without long term support, they would be on the hook for back porting critical patches into the kernel. Since they did choose a long term kernel release, they can focus on what sets Mint apart, maintaining their Cinnamon interface, rather than maintaining a custom kernel release.

On a related note, Alpine Linux and Slackware Linux also chose the 4.4 kernel.

You'll want this bad boy right here http://arm.slackware.com/, and this OMX Remote on your phone.

Silent media player, 1080, NFS mount, remote control. Priceless.

Oh, and the Canadian dollar goes a long way in the UK these days :)

yadda yadda yadda.

Linux does not "force" you into anything: systemd is still optional and many linux distros run perfectly well without systemd (including my old friend Slackware).

And if you really don't like Linux, there is always the BSD. Nope, no systemd there, no sirree.

So anyway... yeah, you have no idea what you are talking about.

Systemd isn't mentioned anywhere in the release notes or the website...

ChangeLog: http://www.slackware.com/chang...

Dude, switch to http://www.slackware.com/ and relax.

Again and again I've heard people like you suggest that Slackware is a replacement for a modern mainstream distro like Debian. Others suggest Gentoo.

Well, the reality is that neither is sufficient.

Slackware is, to put it politely, very primitive. While simplicity is a good thing, Slackware takes it to the point where it becomes a liability.

When using Debian, it's possible to get a full-featured desktop or server set up with very little effort, and this can be done quickly. Thanks to sensible defaults and a practical installer, manual configuration is kept to a minimum.

Slackware, on the other hand, requires far too much manual intervention just to get a minimally usable system set up ...

A.C. --

Please define primitive, very little effort and manual intervention.

I can have a fully functioning Slackware system up and running in 30 min, including formatting the HDD with very little manual intervention.

Slackware 14.2 is about to be released. It boots either BIOS or EFI and runs Linux 4.4.11 and a number of Desktop Environments, all without systemd.

There is now a set of 'slackware live' ISO images where I can run with persistence and optionally encrypted from a USB Drive:

http://docs.slackware.com/slackware:liveslak/

a complete 64bit Slackware-current Live Edition (in a 2.6 GB ISO);
a slimmed-down XFCE ISO (700 MB) with XDM as the graphical login manager. It fits on a CDROM medium or a 1 GB USB stick;
an ISO image (3.1 GB) of Slackware64-current containing Plasma 5 instead of KDE 4, with an addition of several other packages from the alienBOB repositories: vlc, libreoffice, calibre, qbittorrent, ffmpeg, chromium, openjdk, veracrypt.
a Mate variant (1.7 GB) where KDE 4 has been replaced by Mate (a Gnome 2 fork);
a Cinnamon flavour (a fork of the Gnome 3 Shell replacing Slackware's KDE 4).
a Custom variant which you can give your own name, its own package list and custom post-install configuration.

When I like what I see, there is an option to install liveslak to the HDD.

As I said Slackware 14.2 is about to be released. This version has succeeded in leaving systemd out while still being able to run the most recent releases of upstream Apps.

Have you actually looked at Slackware ?

There's a lot to like.

-- kjh

Also a slack user. Started with it in the late 90's, switched to Red Hat for a while because that's what the company I worked for at the time used. When Red Hat went commercial I tried a few others before settling on Debian. Still used Red Hat at work so it was nice to get used to More Than One Way of Doing It.

When systemd came along I switched back to Slackware and have been giving OpenBSD a try on smaller hobby projects.

I recently installed slackware for a friend as a personal firewall and this helped a lot... Still not just an option on install but it was easy to follow and left with me with a lean, mean machine.

http://www.slackware.com/~vbat...

If we're using the full desktop DVD .iso file for Ubuntu 16.04 (amd64), and not the Ubuntu Core, Server, or netinstall images, then it's 1.4 GB.

Slackware 14.1 is 2.4 GB (source: http://www.slackware.com/getsl... )
FreeBSD is 2.7 GB (source: ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/Free... )
Solaris 11.3 is 1.4 GB for the USB (source: http://www.oracle.com/technetw... )
Devuan beta is 4.36 GB (source: https://files.devuan.org/devua... )
Fedora 23 Workstation is 1.4 GB (source: https://getfedora.org/en/works... )

The Slackware 14.1 ISO (for amd64) is almost twice as big as Ubuntu 16.04's. See: http://www.slackware.com/getsl...

But I don't know why people are complaining so much. The same can be said for BSD and Linux distros. An older BSD or Linux release is not going to work on newer systems

Mainly because people don't like Windows 10. If the new Windows were so great that people wanted to upgrade, then no one would complain (think of Vista -> 7, no one complained about that one). The only reason people are complaining is because they don't want to upgrade, and are sad because they are forced to. Upgrade here, sad people.

Microsoft already allows this capability, you need to search better. Here are the instructions, although I prefer these.

Are you talking about this Slackware? The one where the latest release announcement is from nearly 2 years ago?! All I want is to use a modern Linux distro without systemd. I don't want to use a 1990s-era relic that hasn't been updated in 2 years, has a dwindling user community, and forces me to waste too much of my time configuring it! FreeBSD has none of those problems. It doesn't use systemd, it has advanced functionality (like ZFS), it has frequent releases, it provides sensible configuration defaults, its bundled software typically has truly free licenses, its user community is vibrant, and it's all around a top notch OS. Leaving Linux for FreeBSD is the smartest thing somebody can do today.

The Slackware FAQ still talks about SoundBlaster 16 and old CD-ROM drives. It gives a strong impression that this is not a distro for modern times.

Well evidently, since you haven't even bothered to look at it beyond the home page, you clearly haven't been pressured enough into bothering to do any real research. Slackware is literally just a vanilla Linux kernel and some prebuilt packages of popular programs - that's all it is. No custom this, no custom that, no preset defaults. If the plain Linux kernel isn't stable, reliable, trustworthy and has a large community, then I don't know why you'd think Debian would have that.

Of course, you're actually right in some ways. While it's designed to be simple to modify for what you wish it to be, it really excels at being a personal OS for a single user, one who can mold it into whatever they want. In particular though, it's not suitable for enterprise use, or at least not without some serious custom modding and testing. The packages, while stable, are fairly new, the prebuilt package repository is fairly small (and the unofficial Slackbuilds isn't stable at all), and the whole package managment system in general doesn't really scale well. The difference is, I actually used it heavily a couple years back, before I switched my peronal workstation to FreeBSD, and I found its weak points (and strong ones) through heavy daily interaction. If you're willing to dismiss it simply because of what it looks like alone, you're clearly not the target audience. So go back to Debian, apt-get purge that Systemd, and put back on your beloved sysvinit. Go ahead, it'll be the same as before, it won't have been cursed by thy evil foe then.

But if you can't be bothered to do any sort of serious study whatsoever, then please quit whining like a three year old, and don't bite off someone's head when they gave you a well-intentioned and helpful reccommendation.

The Slackware FAQ still talks about SoundBlaster 16 and old CD-ROM drives. It gives a strong impression that this is not a distro for modern times.

The legality of that is also dubious, especially in the case of CC-NC or similar content. The Grateful Dead, for example, have a very strict non-commercial-use license for their concert recordings which explicitly forbids any sort of advertisement attached to their music. If I put the Dead's music on my (ad-free) site, and someone else injects ads, that someone could well be liable for violating the Dead's copyrights. Which, since many of the Dead's copyrights are held in part by one of the founders of the EFF, could be a risky move.

Of course, most content on the net is provided as-is, so it's not a general problem, but for cases like this, the ISPor CDN might well find themselves in legal hot water. (And it does have some obvious analogy to the case at hand.)

So set up a distro maintained by straight white males, for straight white males.

Done!.

Slackware.

To make the current hate-spewing-fad even funnier in its ignorance, Slackware Linux doesn't even use SysV-style init, they use BSD-style.

Last I checked, slackware did use sysvinit for its init process, just without SysV-style init scripts. Let's see, hmm, there is actually support for SysV init scripts, and it sure looks to me like there's a sysvinit package.

And Gentoo doesn't use either.

Uh no. Guess what? OpenRC doesn't replace your init. Gentoo does use sysvinit, with OpenRC.

roflcopter!

I guess what makes the roflcopter go around and around is that you're laughably ignorant, and complaining that others are ignorant about the very things about which you're currently displaying your ignorance.

Might I suggest Armed Slack as a suitable replacement?

You're trying really hard, but it's not working. Slackware 1.0 boasted Kernel source and image at .99pl11 Alpha. Yggdrasil had 0.98.1 version of the Linux kernel.

1.0 to 1.0 or it's a bullshit comparison.

Minimal footprint? The recommended installation method of Slackware is still to install "everything". From the installation guide:

If this is your first time installing Slackware, the "full" method is highly recommended. Even if this isn't your first time, you'll probably want to use it anyway.

This gives you a much bigger footprint than what Mint, Ubuntu or Arch give you by default.

Mind you, I love Slackware for its straightforwardness and simplicity in configuration, but footprint is not really a reason to recommend it.

Finally, I don't think that footprint matters a lot these days. What do I care if my distro takes up 5GB or 10GB... Sure I may not need all of the packages that are installed, but the convenience of having most commonly used libraries and programs at hand and not having to track things down as-needed is worth more to me than a few measly gigs of disk space.

"I see nobody working on an alternative init system. "

There are better init systems in use and supported. Slack init has been it's own thing for a very long time, a bit of a cross between BSD and SysV that follows the slackware philosophy. Simple, robust, and easy to work with.

Gentoo still uses their own fork of init with OpenRC. OpenRC, in a nutshell, provides the features of Systemd or Upstart without breaking compatibility.

Systemd (and upstart, since you mentioned it) is not something primarily created to solve a technical problem. They exist primarily for political reasons. They are Red Hat and Canonical's attempts to rip out the guts of *nix and replace it with vendor-specific infrastructure that they can control and direct.

OpenRC isn't taken seriously because the gentoo folks propose it and now that both Debian and Red Hat, the two major players on the market, have both decided to play along with the systemd game (one of them was more or less forced into it, but no matter), systemd is omnipresent and impossible to stop.

"Because gentoo" makes no sense. Regardless, 'omnipresent and impossible to stop' is bullshit. What is unfortunately true is that Red Hat, Ubuntu, and now Debian will be outside the pale of *nix systems. One large *nix* ecosystem has been effectively forked into three systems. Red hat will own one, Canonical will own one, and the remaining *nix systems, including Linux, Gentoo, and *BSD will remain our own ecosystem that no one can own. It's sad that Debian is officially going the other way but hey, best of luck to them in their new role as Red Hat sattellites.

Linux is just fine actually, it's only certain distros are continuing to break themselves.

"If you think sysv init is not broken, then you must not have been using unix systems in earnest."

SysV is broken, yes, and systemd is worse. I do not use or want either of them.

"BSD init is way simpler, true, but then that was deemed to be too inflexible already in the golden times of Unix. You really want to go back to that? Seriously?"

What go back? Never left.

"the journal instead of a set of randomly formatted text-dumps all over /var/log,"

A huge regression. Replacing a simple, robust, well supported system with something overly complicated is NOT a gain for me.

"a convenient way to kill apache with all the crap that it started,"

Something wrong with apachectl stop?

"a more robust boot process that is not sprinkled with sleep 5 statements to give daemons enough time to be fully up before bringing up services that depend on them being there."

You're confused, you actually getting a less robust boot process here. But it will be faster!

Well, ok. My computer boots fast enough without it, thanks.

"a more secure system by being able to isolate daemons from one another and the rest of the system."

A far less secure system actually. Without it, the only real attack front is sshd. With it, we suddenly have another front to worry about - and an attack here is likely to be much more damaging.

"a lot of convenient system config tools that work on (almost) all modern Linux distributions and do so even better that the "do one thing and do it well" tools that got replaced by them"

You REALLY seem confused now. You have the players backwards.

"Sheesh:-)"

Exactly.

No, really, Slackware. Never mind it gets bad press from all the *buntu fanbois. Slackware does NOT get in your way. Hackable to the extreme. Comes with 5 different desktop environments, pick one. Don't like it, install something else. Slackware don't care. You can make it work YOUR way. No strange shit happening in the night while you sleep.

I often think people like *buntu coz it reminds them of how Windows behaved. *buntu keeps doing strange shit when you not looking. Slackware? Something not working, you got a hardware problem. This thing just works. Every day, all day, all night. Boring really. The good kind of boring. Like mainframe boring, Novell Netware boring, OS/2 boring, SysV boring. Damn thing just works, no hysterics.

And they don't go changing the initialization system on you, either. Same old boring init scripts we've been using since Adam was a boy. Get it here -> http://www.slackware.com./ See the boring website. This is the oldest distro around. Kernel version - 3.10.17-smp. Boring, no drama.

Want Gnome? Get it here -> http://www.droplinegnome.org/. Can't imagine why anybody would.

Thank me later.

In case you or someone else doesn't already know, one of the main contributors to Slackware has already done most of the hard work.

http://www.slackware.com/~alie...

You can build it yourself or just download the package. Available for 14.0, 14.1 or current.

Harshly stated, but in essence, true: Linux has to generate income. Android does it with massive, unavoidable invasion of privacy. Ubuntu does it with a minor, transparent and easily disabled intrusion into some of your online life.

Debian does it with volunteer work where possible, and donations for stuff (e.g. hosting) that needs money.

Arch does it with a similar volunteer/donation scheme.

Uncle Pat does it with stability and simplicity, to the exclusion of modernity (e.g. still no PAM, no sysv init scripts, and you bet your life no systemd/upstart) -- and enough people want this option to remain available that they voluntarily buy CD sets (in lieu of downloading ISOs) or slackware-branded merchandise, in sufficient amounts to pay the bills for Pat.

But yeah, if you're making a distro that doesn't appeal to either the sort of people who can volunteer useful help, or the sort who are willing to donate money (whether structured as a "donation", or as the "purchase" of physical media), I guess maybe you have to hope they're the sort who'll barter away their privacy for software. Since I am the sort who has donated and will continue to donate to projects I'd rather didn't die, I by definition don't care about projects that need to monetize my privacy to continue existing.

Or if you're greedy^Wprofit-oriented, and therefore want more income than people are willing to donate, you might have to seek alternate income sources such as users giving up their privacy. But I don't care about that, because IMO I'm a lot better off using a distro made by people focusing on making a good distro, than one made by people focusing on making a big profit. But what do I know, I'm one of those crazy* right-libertarians who believes the only thing better than a (reasonably small) company, driven to make a good product by competition and the greed/profit motive, is a (reasonably small) co-op, driven to make a good product by the members' individual motive to benefit from the goodness of the product they themselves both make and use.

I believe both preceeding cases describe Canonical, a for-profit company making an OS that's wildly popular with freeloading "end-user" types -- so I don't question the economic sense (for Canonical) of resorting privacy-monetization, and I don't really mind that they and their non-privacy-valuing users make that voluntary trade. OTOH, for the reasons stated, I also don't care whether Canonical disappears from the face of the Earth, so if I find myself, for whatever reason, using an Ubuntu machine, you can bet I'm turning it off.

*craziness measured relative to my fellow US right-libertarians, to most of whom "co-op" is a four-letter word. I have seriously heard the sentence "I can see why you'd want such a thing, but a co-op just feels too socialist for me." Yeah, we're all about the individual liberties, economic freedom of voluntary association, etc., but the moment a few guys want to voluntarily associate into a certain class of organization, without imposing it on anyone else, we knee-jerk and cry "socialist"?! </political-rant>

Init would have been my pick, but I still hope this works out well for them.

An article for WinNT turning 20, but nothing for Slackware when it did the same 10 days ago? What is wrong with you, Slashdot?

Wait, don't answer that...

You could have submitted it to Slashdot. That's how this place runs...

An article for WinNT turning 20, but nothing for Slackware when it did the same 10 days ago? What is wrong with you, Slashdot?

Wait, don't answer that...

True indeed, however the current branch switched over to MariaDB back in March (changelog) So Slack 15 or 14.1, whichever comes next, will be shipped with MariaDB insted of MySQL.