SolutionInstallSlackware™

This is not quite the same as UseDistroX™.

It’s the heart-felt agonized plea of an old-school Neck-beard, who remembers how things used to be. Why can’t we just get rid of the cracked bells and shattered whistles and go back to when times were good?

I have a huge amount of sympathy for this. Back in the 1990s, when I first installed Linux off (I think) twelve floppies, the only distro in town was Slackware. And Slackware was easily an equivalent of its peers. It didn’t pretend to be an alternative to Solaris, on the one hand, and it didn’t pretend to compete with Win95, on the other.

It had about eleven too many floppies to install on a toaster, and probably a couple of thousand too few to install on a super-computer.

It might have had a primitive desktop – I can’t recall. I only ever used the CLI, which was obviously the intent.

And its peers? Its peers were the *BSDs. They had much the same features (I’d argue better implemented, but still), and in fact their installation process was even more hideous. You didn’t just specify an extent (in 512 byte chunks, unless you magically added a K or an M) on a *BSD, oh no. You actually had to calculate the start and end of the partition. For every partition. I think there was even some sort of alignment adjustment you had to make.

No, Slackware was fine. In fact, Slackware is still fine. Slackware even teaches you something about computers, which is that, at some fundamental and very low-lying level, they hurt.

Slackware really doesn’t pretend to be anything it’s not.

Anyhoo.

With the increasing train-wreck that is the congeries of modern Linux desktops every six months, I’ve noticed that the old Neckbeards are getting more and more vocal about this. It’s a phrase that’s coming back into style:

“Solution: Install Slackware.”

(Seen on a link from Chlorus)