That's what I used to do, too, until I found out that there's a simpler way:

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Thanks for the tip :-)

I ran a quick exercise to see if the two commands resulted in the same environment, and they're pretty close:

http://ciar.org/h/sudo_i_vs_sudo_su.txt

I think the MAIL difference is a bug I should rectify, and I've overlooked setting LC_ALL=C in root's .bashrc. Once that's done, the environments will be even closer.

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I started using Linux in 1997. I think I heard about it in hacker channels on IRC first. I first installed Redhat (Hurricane) in 1997 I think it came with a book I bought or maybe it was a library book. I used Redhat until the (Manhattan) release and never really liked it. After that I downloaded Debian Slink on 56k modem to a fat windows disk. It took forever to Download and once I got it downloaded I installed it from the windows partition using the vfat kernel module and the dual boot system. The default manager or desktop in Debian slink was Window Maker and I had to compile a kernel just to get sound to work (that should tell you how long ago it was) Then about 2001 I changed to FreeBSD then eventually NetBSD. Then around 2010 it was OpenBSD mostly. I tried Slackware around 2001 but it was too much a pain in the ass for me then before my *BSD experiences.

I use Slackware on my laptop right now for no other reason than OpenBSD and FreeBSD don't fully support my hardware e.g. I have an Atheros QCA9377 wireless card.

With this new laptop I tried Fedora 30, Debian, MxLinux, Debian Buster, and Arch Linux but Slackware is the most Unix-like or most like FreeBSD and OpenBSD so that is why I use it right now on my laptop as we speak.

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To know why I use Slackware it's important to know why I started using Linux;
I've had some experience with Linux since around 2006 or so when I used our school's Ubuntu equipped computers. I'm not sure which version, but I liked how simple it was. I continued to play around with Linux as time allowed, but I didn't make the full jump until 2014 with the fustercluck that is Windows 10. I started with Ubuntu (like a lot of Linux users) and from there I moved to Fedora, Debian, Centos, Arch, Zorin, OpenSUSE, Devuan and even a short run with Gentoo. While I liked Linux I knew something was missing, and I never really found a distro that clicked. Then I started going deeper down the rabbit hole and started disliking the Windows-ification of distros like Fedora and Ubuntu where things were constantly obfuscated and hidden from users. My horrible experience with systemD (where it would simply hang, and bug reports were given the 'not a bug wontfix') was the final straw and I looked for a distro that was stable, didn't have systemD, granted the user full control, was lightweight, and above all simple to manage. As you all know Slackware checks out in spades in those categories. So I created a VM, at this point I was back to Devuan as it met most of that criteria, and upon seeing that text installer I knew I was hooked.

A year later I have Slackware on both of my machines and have yet to have even the smallest issue with it. I continue to use Slackware because it's stable (Devuan had internet issues, so circa early 2018 it failed this criteria), doesn't have systemD, grants me the user control to do whatever I wish or don't wish with my machine, is lightweight, and is simple to manage in day to day use. I'm currently a senior in college with three other Linux users and they have had issues with their Debian, Mint and Arch installs while my Slackware install trucks along.

That was similar to my experience.. I was using FreeBSD and admired its simple init system and the rc.* scripts. I wanted something in Linux land that was as easy for me. I searched for a Linux most like *BSD, and Slackware was one of the top results. I clicked on the link, downloaded it (10.2 I believe) and have been a believer ever since. Most of my computers run Slackware (with exceptions for some retro computers). I will never use another distro, since Slackware fulfills my needs so completely. Certainly I have no need to migrate elsewhere.

I use Slackware it is cheap and free. The source code is there so I can fix the stuff they rarely seem to fix.
It it seems to work 89 percent better than most out of the box.
Customization is a plus.

Hi,

Would you care to share what you had to fix? We do get Slackware64 changelog notices and corrections.

My experiences with Slackware are that it is a stable,usable distribution. Sure sometimes I will need to tweak for hardware specific needs but that is not a big problem most of the time. Sometimes I may find a lack of a driver for new hardware but of late that has not been a problem because I am not upgrading to latest and greatest since my retirement restricts that.

I do miss my University LAB days where I could get the latest via my budget allotments. Always easier to use other's money to get the new toys!

Hope this helps.
Have fun & enjoy Slackware!

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PV would be grateful for that donation. Your cheap and free distro is his livelihood.
Support Slackware: https://paypal.me/volkerdi

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I use Slackware for all of those reasons, plus PUNK ROCK.

MAYHEM!
ANARCHY!

BSD init would be a close second.

I started my Linux journey with Slackware. After distro-hopping for 4-5 years and using elementaryOS for about 3 years, I am back on Slackware. Part of the reason is because of the major issues I've had with systemd and the complexification of my own computers because of the contributions of Ubuntu and other distros. I switched back to Slackware nearly 8 months ago and don't remember why I ever left.

Slackware is simple. Slackware is easy. It is extremely understandable. It reminds me of all the possibilities that computing provides and makes me feel like I can literally do anything. In my honest opinion, scripts > systemd. yeah... systemd is honestly my main reason I think. Well, that and the horrid experience I've had with apt and yum and all the other package managers. I like to be in control of my own computers.

So I guess that's my reason. There are plenty of others, like my preference for CLI apps and extremely slimmed down (RAM-wise) systems. I like simplicity, and that's Slackware.

Cheers!

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+1 to most of that. Though I must say that when I used Debian, I never had any trouble with the apt system. Most of the time it just purrs along. But when it does go wrong (as it did for an AntiX-using friend of mine), it's a pig to put right again, so I can see the logic of not building dependencies into the system.

I too find Slackware simple, friendly and easy to understand.

My main problem with apt was that installing one package subsequently installed others that were not hard deps. They added Desktop entries in my 'app list', which annoyed me.

The worst one was when I uninstalled Firefox it installed something else. I think it was Epiphany. I just wanted Falkon, but could remove Epiphany without apt autoinstalling Firefox and vice versa. I think that was the straw that broke the camel's back.

Those things happen when you have installed a desktop environment and it brought a cloud of applications along with it. As I don't like DE's, I never ran into a problem like that.

Installing things that aren't hard dependencies can sometimes be due to your apt.conf file including "recommends". I hate those; they really are intrusive.

All of the reasons in the poll are valid in my case, but there's a bit more to the story. Back in 2016 I had a secondhand ThinkPad T430s as my personal laptop, even though it was "old and busted". It still worked fine, especially after I took it apart, blew out the dust, upgraded the RAM, replaced the battery, and swapped out the original HDD for a SSD of equal capacity. When I discovered that I could run OpenBSD on it, I was happy to leave Linux behind after twenty years of distro hopping. My first exposure to Unix was on a SPARCstation running SunOS (a BSD derivative), and I had come back to BSD decades later.

Then my wife's Macbook crapped out, and she wanted a machine with a better keyboard. She tried my T430s and found she liked it just fine, as long as she didn't have to be the sysadmin.

This left me without a computer until I got my hands on a used ThinkPad T60. I refurbished it as I did the T430s, but try as I might I couldn't get the built-in AR5418 wifi chipset to work on OpenBSD. While I could have replaced it with an Intel wifi card, I didn't want to open up the T60 a second time when the wifi worked under Linux, but not OpenBSD.

I tried Debian for a few weeks, before cleaning out my closet and discovering a 4CD Slackware 8.0 distribution that I had forgotten that I had (along with FreeBSD 4.3 and Neverwinter Nights). I was tempted to try installing Slackware 8, but decided to grab 14.2 instead. I figured that if I needed to migrate to -current to get up-to-date versions of Firefox and Emacs, it would be easier if I started with the latest stable release.

Lo and behold! after reading the documentation and updating stable using slackpkg, I had the current versions of Firefox and Emacs that I wanted without migrating to -current, so I'm happily using 14.2 and building additional packages like quodlibet and mu/mu4e using the SBo repository.

I don't remember why I didn't stick with Slackware back in the day, but I don't plan on repeating my mistake.

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I see this thread ran from 2017 to late last year (2019), so the interest was sustainable and I hope I'm not too late to add a voice.

So fascinating to see how diverse a group of people have been drawn to this early-yet-still-active distro and how the general consensus is that recurring theme of stability and the feeling of being in control, despite the odd criticism for this-or-that failing regarding a certain hardware or favourite application.

Regarding diversity, I was struck by user "aragorn2101" from Mauritius who was introduced to Slackware in the Physics Dept, University of Mauritius, and is now a Phd in Astronomy. First of all, I had to look up where Mauritius was and then marvel not only how the internet has connected us, but the basic evolutionary path of computing has connected us globally too. When something is good, that will eventually be recognized far and wide.

My trajectory to Slackware is that of a late-comer to computers, for someone of my age-group (60+). While many of my age were tinkering with Radio Shack computer kits back in the 1970s, my first hands-on introduction (apart from writing multiple-choice tests where we'd mark dots on punch cards) was a course in programming where the assignments were done at a teletype terminal in the library basement. Though some friends envisioned what was to come and gravitated towards computer science, I was totally unimpressed with the clunky early machines and could not foresee how quickly the technology would change in coming decades, nor how utterly pervasive the changes would become.

Instead I literally shunned computers well into the 1990s. I was in fact almost a Luddite. As a university drop-out, I travelled and bounced from job to job, finally finding in taxi driving an occupation that seemed to fit, but still computers were not to found in my life. But an interest in writing had led me to learn touch-typing on a manual typewriter, and years of studying Japanese led me to dabble in some translation work, and suddenly computers began to make sense. A Canon StarWriter word processor was my first introduction, but a friend realized that I needed to "graduate" to real computers and insisted I accept a used office machine (a 386 with Windows95 installed) to get started, which would give me something called "e-mail" that would allow me to accept remote assignments more easily. That was in 1997 and I was in my mid-40s.

Well, Windows95 on a wonky old 386 was not a pleasant experience, I can tell you! The blue screen of death made its appearance on more than one occasion and I adding new hardware like sound cards or hard drives made things even worse. I cursed the technology and my old reluctance towards computers began to return. But then, something changed. Despite how awful Windows95 was, and despite how bad the hardware I was using, there was something about the wide-ranging applications -- the sheer possibilities -- that this machine beckoned. And back then you could always drop to a "command prompt" and play with something called DOS. And there was something called QBasic which allowed for programming that could come to life in graphics. And you could install games that played under DOS, and use dial-up terminals to check BBS boards or reserve books at the local library etc. I was beginning to get hooked.

I learned how to put together home-builds with newer mother-boards and mixes of drives and other hardware. And then Linux came along with its myriad distros and its awesome BASH shell that made DOS batch files look like pathetic excuses for programs. I learned BASH shell programming and dabbled with Tcl and Awk. It was time to make Linux my OS of choice. But omg what a learning curve! Cursing the machine was far from over. As many of you remember the 1990s versions of Linux distros were not entirely user friendly either. I tried RedHat, Caldera, TurboLinux, and Mandrake. Of those, Mandrake was the most satisfying and easiest out of the box, but still suffered from "dependency hell" when trying to upgrade software or add new applications. When experimenting with an early version of Debian I learned that the RPM package manager was not the only way to go and that APT-get was far more sane. Although the RPM package management system may well have solved its early problems, I abandoned all RPM-based distros in favour of Debian long ago and stuck with Debian over multiple desktops and laptops right up till 2019. I tried Ubuntu briefly but disliked how it tried to make Debian into something more proprietary and especially the odd abandonment of "su" for "sudo". And of course then came the debate over systemd and abandonment of SysV-init.

When Debian officially adopted systemd, I opted to try the non-systemd fork of Debian called Devuan which is also a very recommendable distro. But I feared that Devuan might not be maintained for long and wanted to search for other non-systemd alternatives which, as we all know, have become more and more scarce. How surprised I was to find Slackware listed as a modern distribution with the distinction of being one of the oldest around which is still maintained, and which (for now at least) has not abandoned the original init softwares. I should mention that I had also tried installing FreeBSD for a while, both on an Acer laptop and on a home-build Desktop with Asus motherboard (Intel i3-4130). FreeBSD reminded me what hands-on installation and configuration were all about and I liked it in many ways but was totally unimpressed with its handling of X-windows configuration. It failed to give me the screen resolution and video playback I knew the machines were capable of, which I could not live with. But Slackware in addition to offering freedom from systemd, was also offering a return to BSD-like basics and control. I could see it was something I could love. The only drawback seemed to be that "no dependency resolution" thing. Despite that, I gave 14.2 a spin in 2019 and have not looked back since.

Why do I like Slackware? Like everyone else: the stability! It has never once crashed. Also the faithful protection of "user-control" principles and the option to be as GUI-modern (nice KDE plasma desktop) or as raw console as you wish. There's a command for almost anything, including setting the console font! That is, you can use "setconsolefont" to select alternates to the console font, and I'm not talking about an xterm under X, I'm talking about the basic non-X console. And as for X-windows options I love that fact that not only can you choose whether to boot into console command prompt or a GUI login prompt, but you can also use the "xwmconfig" command to automatically setup which Window Manager (of those you have installed) to become default, or to switch between from the console prompt.

And as for the dependency resolution issue? It took me a while to warm up to SlackBuilds, but for most of the non-default extras I wanted to add they have worked just fine, and I have to say that the compilation of new software from source in this manner is very reliable.

I still keep Devuan 2.0 (Ascii) as a second option at boot time. But note that this dual-boot scenario was created with by editing /etc/lilo.conf on the Slackware partition, and Devuan and Slackware are installed on physically separate drives on the same desktop. It is the best of both worlds as far as I'm concerned.

So from 1970s Luddite, to 1990s newbie, to Debian aficionado, to present-day Slackware enthusiast: I would say that Slackware has, if anything, renewed my faith in Opensource software and reinvigorated my love of basic computing which has been, for me at least, a long time in the making.

Long live Slackware.

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