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Slackware 14.2 Released, Still Systemd-Free (slackware.com)
sombragris writes: Slackware, the oldest GNU/Linux distribution still in active maintenance, was released just minutes ago. Slackware is noted for being the most Unix-like of all Linux distributions. While sporting kernel 4.4.14 and GCC 5.3, other goodies include Perl 5.22.2, Python 2.7.11, Ruby 2.2.5, Subversion 1.9.4, git-2.9.0, mercurial-3.8.2, KDE 4.14.21 (KDE 4.14.3 with kdelibs-4.14.21) Xfce 4.12.1... and no systemd!
According to the ChangeLog: "The long development cycle (the Linux community has lately been living in "interesting times," as they say) is finally behind us, and we're proud to announce the release of Slackware 14.2. The new release brings many updates and modern tools, has switched from udev to eudev (no systemd), and adds well over a hundred new packages to the system. Thanks to the team, the upstream developers, the dedicated Slackware community, and everyone else who pitched in to help make this release a reality." Grab the ISOs at a mirror near you. Enjoy! The torrents page can be found here.
According to the ChangeLog: "The long development cycle (the Linux community has lately been living in "interesting times," as they say) is finally behind us, and we're proud to announce the release of Slackware 14.2. The new release brings many updates and modern tools, has switched from udev to eudev (no systemd), and adds well over a hundred new packages to the system. Thanks to the team, the upstream developers, the dedicated Slackware community, and everyone else who pitched in to help make this release a reality." Grab the ISOs at a mirror near you. Enjoy! The torrents page can be found here.
Oldest, sure... but behind? least developed? Where are you getting those ideas from?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
They might be opposed to systemd on a moral level but, they may not be able to avoid it on a technical level. As systemd absorbs more and more things, and more things start to depend on systemd, it's a simple problem of manpower: Unless your distro is run by a multi-billion dollar company that has the resources to undo the damage caused by systemd, you may have no choice but to adopt it.
It's interesting to think of systemd in terms of The Cathedral and Bazaar. RedHat built a really nice stall in the middle of the bazaar. Initially everyone loved it and it was very healthy for the bazaar. Then one day they looked around and realized that they owned considerable interests in all the surrounding stalls in the bazaar and decided, "You know what? We should just build a cathedral right here in the middle of the bazaar and bring all these stalls inside".
Considering every single essential part of the operating system that systemd has "absorbed" so far has also been successfully forked, and a backwards compatible version of that does not depend on systemd is available, I'm not sure how much of a problem the picture you paint above is going to be.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I started with Slackware back around 1994-ish, enjoyed feeding the endless floppy disks during the install and even "released the magic smoke" on a monitor due to some booboos in the modelines setting up XFree86. After some years on Redhat/Fedora, a friend, back around 2007, introduced me to Ubuntu and I've been on that since, and am currently on 14.04LTS. However, I have a sneaking suspicion I'm not gonna be moving to 16.04 due to the infestation of systemd into the Ubuntu infrastructure... I've tried the previous version of Slackware 14.1 both on my laptop and in vbox, and I got a feeling I'm gonna move to this new release of Slackware as it gets closer to EOL of 14.04.....
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
Well, I'm sad to say that it was actually my fault. I have a habit when I'm debugging particularly tricky MPI code (we do massively parallel scientific simulation) to use "sleep(pid)" where "pid" is the "processor ID" or "rank" of the current MPI process.
See, your problem was that you should have used "sleep(pid % 10)". That way when you release your debug code, performance is just "not quite right" instead of "broken in an unfathomable way". Then, when you realize you've released your debug code, you can quietly go in, take it out, bless a new build and humbly accept your accolades for your engineering prowess.
Slack was the first distro I ever loaded back in the 90s.
I imagine that a large portion of slashdot readers cut their teeth on slack. Slack was probably the most popular user distro when slashdot was founded. And I imagine most people installed it by getting a CDROM out of the back of their first linux book. Downloading slack over a 2400bps connection was practically a sisyphean task.
I used to love Slackware. Timely releases, no dependency hell, and very simple package management.
There was never a problem with their package management...simple tgz files with an install script onsite, and there were multiple tiny 3rd party utils to manage versions and uninstalls. It really was great for being able to have a minimal system, know exactly what was on it, and just be able to understand it perfectly.
A couple of years ago, this changed. It was now not only recommended to do a full install, but support was not required UNLESS people did a full install, at least by most of the community.
This is frustrating. Slackware started out as being the most unix like Linux. Something it has clearly abandoned...when installing mplayer REQUIRES installing Samba, just in case you need to play a file across an SMB share.
They are not targeting the same audience, and instead are targeting the audience of distros like Ubuntu...except they won't ever win. I don't know what niche they serve anymore, aside from brand loyalists.
Arch seemed like a good replacement, but it is bleeding edge only. So, I've gone to the BSD side. I would love for Slackware to do a course correction, but that seems unlikely.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
Well one of the main reasons Volkerding was/is considering systemd is boot time, and udev being phased out in favor of systemd. Slackware's init has been tested so it works, but it's a bit slower than the competition.
"Concerning systemd, I do like the idea of a faster boot time (obviously), but I also like controlling the startup of the system with shell scripts that are readable, and I'm guessing that's what most Slackware users prefer too. I don't spend all day rebooting my machine, and having looked at systemd config files it seems to me a very foreign way of controlling a system to me, and attempting to control services, sockets, devices, mounts, etc., all within one daemon flies in the face of the UNIX concept of doing one thing and doing it well. To the typical end user, if this results in a faster boot then mission accomplished."
Although I think he should really consider runit over systemd, because Void Linux uses it and it boots really fast. It's probably the fastest booting binary distribution. Of course a customized Gentoo install could probably beat it. IMO Void sort of embodies that same ideals that Slackware does (i.e. a simple and effective system that puts the administrator in control rather than the corporation) but it uses modern tools that do that and it's rolling release, while Slackware is more focused stability.