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Is Slackware Fading Away?

Posted by Hemos on from the don't-fade-away dept.

A reader writes "I just read over on userlocal.com about how David Cantrell announced he is no longer actively developing protopkg and autoslack (these are 2 apps that could have brought slack out of the stoneage but still kept to slacks philosophy of K.I.S.S.). So is it almost "game over" for the first commercial linux distribution which used to be the heavyweight champ?"

3 of 531 comments (clear)

  1. Slackware isn't dead. It's just not for everyone. by Jsprat23 · · Score: 5, Informative

    I don't think Slackware is quite dead. I switched to Slackware 7.0 after Red Hat screwed up my partition tables. I now use Slackware 8.0 and haven't looked back since or regretted my dicision. Sure Slackware takes a little more time to maintain, but the people who use Slakware aren't above using ./configure; make; make install to get the programs they need/want.

    I've never had a problem with the stability of a Slackware distro because Patrick Volkerding puts out a quality distro with out a ot of bloat.

    Thanks for such a good distro Patrick.

    Adam

  2. Long Live Slackware! by LazyDawg · · Score: 5, Informative

    Even if they stopped developing it, made it illegal in the lower 48 states, systematically jailed or impounded Slackware users or fed us to ravenous wolves, I'd not stop using this distro. It has everything I want on the CD, plenty of office suites and window managers, no shortage of development tools, and a small/fast enough footprint to still work on an i386 with 16 megs of RAM. That's not half bad for software I started using six years ago.

    Lacking really ultra-advanced package management has never been much of a problem either. While the setup programs weren't quite as "saleable" as the pretty GUI frontends, they were colorful, used an easy-to-follow menu system, and gave a very detailed description of what they were doing, when, at all times. Compare that to, say, the Corel setup wizard, which kept crapping out on even slightly non-standard hardware.

    --
    "Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
  3. Re:Ob: Pedantic by Lew+Pitcher · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm assuming userlocal.com is alluding to /usr/local. They're wrong. /usr is not "User", it's "Unix System Resources", and is pronounced "Yew Ess Ar"

    Sorry, you are wrong. "Unix System Resources" is a retro-nym for /usr, much like "Packet InterNet Groper" is a retro-nym for ping; both are incorrect 'explanations' for for terms who's origin and meaning have been hidden by time.

    /usr has always meant 'user' in Unix, and continues to mean 'user' even today. In the original Unix implementations, /usr was where the home directories of the users were placed (that is to say, /usr/someone was then the directory now known as /home/someone ). This has been confirmed many times by references to the historical documents (vid "Unix for Beginners" Bell Labs, 1978, or "The Unix Programming Environment", Bell Labs, 1984, which says (in part) "On many systems, /usr is a directory that contains the directories of all the normal users of the system.")

    In current Unices, /usr is where user-land programs and data (as opposed to 'system land' programs and data) hang out. The name hasn't changed, but it's meaning has narrowed and lengthened from "everything user related" to "user usable programs and data".

    So, you are wrong. Deal with it.

    --

    "values of beta will give rise to dom!"