I migrated my desktop/server back to Slackware Linux yesterday. I have been using various distributions on and off recently, from Debian to Arch to Gentoo, and now back to Slack. I’m not really sure what came over me, but I just felt the call, and I had to respond!

Slackware is the oldest currently maintained Linux Distribution, and it’s aged quite well. The Slackware team did a really great job on the latest version (13.37, released April 27th of this year). The distribution comes bundled with KDE 4.5 as its primary desktop environment, but that’s not the only option for users! I’m really liking KDE on my desktop because it has a decent graphics card and can handle some of the nicer desktop effects without slowdown, but more frugal users can install Fluxbox, Windowmaker, or a handful of other slimmer window managers.

It’s sort of nice to step away from the rolling release distributions like Arch and Gentoo occasionally. When I used Arch, I was updating my packages every day (with pacman, the greatest name for a packaging tool on the planet), and 98% of the time everything would work flawlessly. Once in a while however, an update would break, and I’d have to go through and figure out what the hell happened Non rolling-release systems like Debian and Slackware are more difficult to keep bleeding edge, but you know that when a new version comes out, the packages will more-or-less work well without too much fussing. This is especially true for Debian’s stable branch Of course I’m not trying to offend users of rolling-release systems, everybody has their preferences, and you should use a distribution that suits your needs. Slackware does that for me.

One nice thing that separates Slackware from other distributions is that it does not do any dependency tracking for you by default. This may seem like a royal pain in the arse for installing software, but one nice thing about it is that at any given time you can know exactly which programs and libraries are installed on your system because you put them there yourself! I keep all software that I’ve installed on top of the base system in a special directory, so that way I can see exactly what I’ve added to my system. It’s a nice feeling to be in total control.

In conclusion: I’m glad to be back with Slackware. It’s always been one of my favorite distributions.