@dcc@annihilation.social @nyanide@lab.nyanide.com The point of Slackware, in my mind, is that it is so simple and unchanging that you can actually own your system over time. My primary reason for using Slackware is that I can fork the whole distro if I really had to, because it is a one-person-sized system. People complain that "Slackware is bloat, it installs hundreds of packages by default", but that is actually the simple approach, because it means Slackware doesn't have repos with 60,000 packages, with unlimited potential combinations. Slackware is rock solid for that. There's only one authoritative configuration, and it is developed and tested for half a decade before each release.

CRUX is very good too, but, I strongly disagree with their "only English" and "delete all docs from packages" mindset. I think CRUX is more invasive philosophically than Slackware in trivial things, yet somehow more disorganized and haphazard at the same time.

How do I do SBo package updates? I wrote ~15 lines of shell and awk script in a shell function, starts with something like "for file in /var/log/packages/SBo" (packages install logs are plain text files, and require a "tag" part in them, SBo is a tag for example). It uses git pull to sync a local copy of the SBo tree. The end result is that it shows me "package x has update entries in the ChangeLog, currently installed version is vx.y.z, here are the 5 git log entries that modified this package in the package tree". I then go over my packages, and decide whether I want to update them or not. I don't update most things, unless I know them to be security sensitive, or I care about new features.

I've made this "update system" in a few hours, fixed a few bugs a couple of times here and there, and used it for years afterwards. It never breaks, it never changes, it gives me all the agency. Well, not really, because it still relies on package maintainers to update their packages, which I don't like. So, I wrote my own RSS/Atom/OtherFormats reader in some 100 lines of shell script, curl, and xslt style sheets, throw it on a cron, to check package releases for critical packages for me, print any updates whenever I start a new shell. I don't rely much on SBo maintainers for packages critical to business production machines (yes, Slackware in prod, serving millions of customers for my clients). Plus, I maintain half a dozen packages on SBo officially, so I have to know about them first :)

All of this is possible because Slackware doesn't have a system. It doesn't enforce things. It trusts you to know what you're doing, and commits to not breaking your work. I rewrote the networking init scripts because I wanted a weird setup with my private networks, and that was easy, and never broke ever on its own. With Slackware I can compound my work building things, I don't have to continuously "churn" trying to keep up. It's what Common Lisp / C / Lua are to the JS+NPM / Rust+Cargo (et al.) never ending slop generators. Even official package updates ask you, with a diff, to judge the new updates, instead of just overwriting your files, unlike some other unmentionable distros.

I worked deeply (build packages, maintain them, etc. for years) with Arch, Gentoo, Debian, and Fedora, worked with FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD to port software to them, and I've used CRUX for a while. Slackware is definitely the most UNIX of Linux systems. Heck, it might be more UNIX than FreeBSD. I think CRUX, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Slackware are closely clustered, philosophically, in the idea space.

I maintain some 20+ Slackware machines, for home use, software development, playing video games, including wine / Steam / VR gaming, self-hosted LLMs, business production (web servers, databases, automation workers, etc.), and a few personal machines and laptops for less-techie family members.

If you have any questions on Slackware, I'm happy to answer.