Is SLACKWARE cleaner & more Linux than DEBIAN (free of junk, spywares, systemd, pulseaudio,...)?
 

Hello,

I consider to move from DEBIAN to SLACKWARE, since it follows much better the LINUX philosophy and SLACKWARE is much cleaner and more stable.

Is SLACKWARE cleaner than DEBIAN (free of junk, spywares, systemd, pulseaudio,...)?

Is it a good choice to use SLACKWARE instead of DEBIAN?

Best regards

Hi...

The newest release, 14.2, is still systemd free, according to the bottom of the page here. However, 14.2 beta did come with Pulseaudio, I'm guessing that still holds true for the stable release. Members who use Slackware might be able to comment further.

I think, in part, that is a matter of personal preference and what you're wanting to do with your system. ;)

Regards...

Not really sure what you mean by "cleaner", or how you define "junk", or why you would take anyone's word that your OS is free of spyware, but yes: Slackware does not use systemd.

It does ship with Pulse Audio, as it is now a hard requirement of Linux Bluetooth drivers. If you don't like it, you can choose to not install it. Or you can try it, and uninstall it later. Slackware doesn't use an automated all-encompassing package manager, so removing Pulse Audio isn't going to do something crazy like uninstall the kernel.


It might be. Depends on what you need. Try it, see if you like it.

I run Slack on all my machines but I do run Debian on an old iBook (PowerPC chip; Debian's the best at supporting it). One thing I do notice about Slack versus Debian is that Debian often puts "helpful" things between you and upstream. For instance, when you install MariaDB on Debian, you are prompted to create a password. Or when you configure Apache, Debian has a system of symlinks to define "sites-enabled" and "sites-disabled". These are things Debian has built to help users do thinks that most users will probably want to do; maybe that works better for you, maybe it annoys you. Ultimately, only you can decide.

I'd recommend trying (and then maybe even moving to) Alpine, it doesn't have systemd, PulseAudio. APK, its package manager, is very close to the mix of dpkg and APT and is written in C, in fact. Also, it's free of GNU (apart from gcc and make); some people consider GNU being junk too.

In Slackware I don't think there is a hard dependency on PulseAudio and if you run a minimalistic setup with a window manager I suppose you can live without it.

Is SLACKWARE cleaner & more Linux than DEBIAN (free of junk, spywares, systemd, pulseaudio,...)?
 

You can remove pulseaudio from Slackware, there's several posts on that topic in this forum.

Anyway, last year, I came back to Linux and thought slackware was "dead" only paying attention to the last stable release. Then choosed to run Debian. My great ignorance of dependency management made me mess everything up in 4 months.

Desperately looking at slackware website for a sign of life, I remembered the existence of a current branch and had a look...

Hallelujah! Got back a system where you rule from the very start : I believe you can rule a other system almost like slackware but slackware gives you the keys from the early start. Nothing will run by default unless you want it to, nothing "activated" by itself and no mess with package management unless you made it.

Just for the record, Debian is just as "clean" (whatever that means) as Slackware. I do not know what your definition of junk is, but I've not encountered anything on Debian I would consider "junk" and certainly not anything remotely spyware-like.

You may not like SystemD or Pulseaudio--I'm certainly not a fan of them. They may be annoying, but they are not "unclean."

Just my two cents.

Debian Stable is certainly stable: that's why its generally the most-used distro on web-servers. But then Slackware is equally stable, as is CentOS. If you want solid reliability it comes down to these three, or a derivative that keeps their essential structure (Antix or Point for Debian, Salix for Slackware)

The choice of a distro depends on what you want to do with it, what computer you're doing it on, and how much time you're prepared to spend getting it to work as you want it to.

Here's a review of the latest Slackware:
http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20160725

IMO you will never get something as stable as an Linux made by yourself. Forget all the rest. You are decide nobody else

This would be Gentoo then. With all great tools provided by Gentoo development team it is a breeze to have your own Linux.

I'm not sure:

1. Is the base system made from scratch ?
2. Updating non stop is that a guarantee of stability ?

You download and unpack binary base system, you build your kernel, this allows you to reboot into your installation. Actually it is not your installation yet, you set up your make.conf to match your CPU and other hardware, enable graphite, LTO and whatnot, adjust USE flags and you rebuild the system. Then you can call it your Gentoo, it is all custom built for you. It is incredible stable, even if you run testing branch. After the system is built and you are happy with it you start adding the software, Xorg is a popular choice for a desktop :p for instance. And so on. You run emerge with -va flags to see if you like all options before committing. Everything you do can be undone in Gentoo. It is never too late to change your mind. And you roll it, unless you run rm -rf / or similar there is never need to reinstall.