Re: [vox] "Lord of the Rings"

[Shwaine <shwaine@malevolenceMAPS.com>]

William wrote:
>
> For some reason, based on just talking to people, I would've thought 
that
> Slackware'd be below Debian.  Now... nothing against Slackware 
(it just
> /seems/ like not many people run it these days), but perhaps this 
is due to
> a blossoming of people registering the Slackware boxes back when the
> Linux Counter first appeared.

I run Slack, as do many others judging by the traffic the Slack forums 
received before they were pulled offline due to a few idiots. The 
Slack newsgroup is also fairly well visited. I started with RedHat,
hated all the stuff it installed. Too much bloat. I haven't had 
too much experience with Debian, but the apt-get stuff actually makes 
me unwilling to try it out. I dislike fancy package managers, primarily 
because they bring alot of bloat along with it (in the form of many 
binaries in one package). I am a very minimalistic sort of Linux 
user. It comes from my efforts to keep my machines as secure as possible,
which means knowing as much as possible about what has been installed.
For example, I only like dig from bind-utils installed. With Slack's 
package manager, I can explode the package into a temporary directory 
to extract dig and the libraries dig requires, place those in the 
appropriate directories, remove the temporary directories and be 
on my way. 

I also dislike network based installs and updates unless the appropriate 
authentication methods (some hash based on public/private key pairs 
for example) are used to make sure the package has not been tampered 
with. I suppose I may be more "hands on" than most users, but I can 
also say that my machine has yet to be broken into. I'll willingly 
forgo package managers if it means the ability to have a fine-grained 
control over what gets installed on my machine and to verify that 
anything which is installed has not been tampered with. Slack gives 
me a distro where I can say to hell with the package manager and 
not have any issues.

Beyond that, Slackware's best selling value has always been the fact 
that it is more secure "out of the box" than other distros, its main 
releases are usually fairly stable and it is more "Unix-like" than 
other Linux distros. I could see many companies with knowledgable 
Unix people gravitating towards Slackware servers as opposed to other 
Linux distros because of these points. From the workstation angle,
there may be less Slackware workstations since many Linux productivities 
tools assume that all Linux distros have the /etc/rc.d/rc.<runlevel> 
directories, which Slack does not use. It is easy enough for a knowledgable 
person to work around, but it would tend to scare off the newbies 
who want to push a button and have everything work. Other than this 
one issue, Slackware is quite usable as a workstation. It contains 
all the standard window managers: Gnome, KDE, Enlightenment, WindowMaker,
etc. So on the XWin side of things, it looks very similar to other 
distros (well, all distros look pretty similar on the XWin side of 
things).

Now that I've said that, I will say I am a bit concerned about Slack's 
future since they were let go when their old parent company was bought 
out. They've had alot of problems with their webserver in recent 
months since moving to their new "home". If it goes under, I think 
I'll switch to one of the BSDs rather than another Linux distro. 
The other Linux distros out there just don't give me all the pluses 
of Slack.

Shwaine the Wandering Arch of Malevolence
--------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.malevolence.com              http://www.shwaine.com
telnet://shwaine.dyn.greystoneapts.com:3000







_______________________________________________
vox mailing list
vox@lists.lugod.org
http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox