/me tips my hat to Patrick

Great distro. Great guy. Great team.

I plan on staying.

Patrick, please keep it up. I am doing what I can to support you. I donated, Slackware is in my signature in my forum (almost 600,000 users)...

Nicely done! I used Slackware for a while, back a few years ago. I remember it being very snappy and stable. My only complaint at the time, was the lack of packages (particularly multimedia and usenet) compared to Debian based distros. I would love to give it a whirl again now that I have a few more ears of Linux experience under my belt.

well worth the wait!
A priceless byte of history, still rolling, right to the future.

Patrick, kindest thanks for the worthy interview!

Very cool interview. This is what Linux is all about . Thank you Patrick.

Thank you Pat, Many Thanks for Slackware and for stay on the road...

This is the interview that I think so many folks have been wanting to see for a very long time.

It sheds light not just on Slackware, as most of us longtime Slackers are already familiar with insofar as the philosophy of the distribution is concerned, i.e., doing one's best not to alter or patch things upstream, etc.; but also what I found especially refreshing in this interview was the extended focus on Patrick himself.

So much about what Slackware is actually stems from who Patrick is himself. Perhaps he is a pariah in this world that expects instant gratification and distance from personal responsibility. If that can be said, then it is indeed the strength with which Slackware Linux is simmered over a low heat until just right.

Slackware doesn't take away the responsibility from the user, and in fact enforces a policy of auteurship on the part of each operator with regards to their machines. Those of us who were raised knowing that this responsibility is ours fail to understand many of the complaints from people who don't understand the freedom that GNU/Linux itself implies, and indeed there are projects that endeavor to decide for the user what their experience should be instead.

Gaining insight into Patrick the man is important because it not only indicates what kind of distribution we can expect in future releases of Slackware, but also because of the speculation that surrounds him as (like it or not Pat) a cult icon.

Long time users of Slackware Linux feel as if we have an affinity with Pat, some sort of implied relationship, whether real or imagined, and that comes from the spirit of what Slackware as a distribution embodies - but that in turn comes from the embodiment of who Patrick is.

So I believe that this interview was especially important, and for those who followed the thread that contributed to the pool of questions preceding the actual interview, it was quite apparent that "Just who is Patrick Volkerding, really?", was a large component of what the community at large was seeking.

Now, there's something we have to fix:

Unfortunately, I think that Pat is going to leave that up to us as well. And we need to pick up the reigns in that regard. We owe him that much at least.

A good start is to go HERE or HERE and follow through. But this is only a start.

Kindest regards,

.

Indeed it is one of the best interviews I have ever read. A lot of insight on Pat V. himself and the state of the project. I wish I could help monetarily, but I don't have a job, and just scholarship money. I'll come back to the Slackware forum after these exams.

There are many challenges ahead, like secure boot and cloud. I hope Slackware stays true, and I think it will after reading this interview.

Thanx LQ and thanx Pat. I really enjoyed this interview. I feel like drugged after reading it. Need more Slacktasy.

Jokes on the side, excellent interview with the insight into the current Slackware development (and challenges) and the man himself. Well worth waiting.

Welcome back H_TeXMeX_H.

Is this interview released as a podcast as well?

Pat,
Thanks for taking the time for the interview. I enjoyed reading the responses of my favorate BDFL of my favorite Linux ditribution. It only seems like yesterday when I fired up Slackware (3, 4?) on my 486DX100 to rip CDs and encode mp3 files.

jeremy,
Thanks for setting up the interview!

Hello, I've been waiting for this interview for a long, long time (as I see, others too)... Thanks a lot for it
I've been using Slackware for 10+ years now....proffesionaly and personaly (you can pretty much say that Slackware is what got me my job ) and I can't imagen a world without Slackware, so I wanna thank Pat and everyone involved in the project for the great job that they are doing

It'd be nice to have it in an audio format but I doubt we'll be that lucky. You can always use some speech synthesiser

While I am on a break from Slackware at the moment because of a hardware issue, I have greatly enjoyed Slackware for so long. Bought a couple of releases and some gear from the store, too.
I wonder about his comment that a newer version of Xfce will introduce Gnome deps? What would that be, Gvfs?

You can see the list of dependencies for Slackware's future XFCE 4.8 or 4.10 here: http://connie.slackware.com/~rworkma...8/source/deps/
That list contains several direct Gnome relations. Not just gvfs.

Eric