Yeah I've done this in 2014 when I was using slackware as a daily driver. I do this mostly for my desktop, my main system. VMs are definitely disposable, but I'm not going to want to build my desktop everytime something fails. Also, I bought a 1 TB WD_BLACK SN850X NVMe and installed slackware on it, didnt even boot. I ended up just pushing one of my small syslinux images right over the super block and it wouldn't even boot so that is going back. I knew that was either faulty or wont boot linux at all. I bought a 960 EVO 512GB NVMe before that but didn't want to do this install on this because I felt that 512 is too little. But I ended up just using this because I had other 256GB 960 EVOs that were solid so I decided Id rather sacrifice 512 for stability. But what if at a later time I want to move to a 1TB or 2TB? Someone else would just re-install it all, but guess what, I actually do real work on linux and with windows VMs, both 10 and 11, and am a security researcher, so I couldn't deal with wasting all that time, nor do I want to, I hate doing that kind of work. I'm not just re-installing and putting my favorite music on there and installing a browser. I got to have my environment set up right, lots of aliases, and bash scripts. I use c and asm so I love that on slackware, everything is all installed and ready to go.

If I want to move to a larger drive, I just attach it via USB, fdisk it the way I want and just tar over my running system excluding proc, sys, run and dev and I can just let it copy (with my VMs it will take a long time, we're talking about 100s of GBs of VMs) and then a few other commands, and I'm back on my exact same system but on a larger drive. And if that drive fails, thats fine, I'll re-do it. It's only a matter of copying and time, I can just let it copy, I'm not really having to configure and set up things that would take me hours. In fact, it would take me an entire day just to do that. And I can have that all done in only the time it takes to copy all the data (And I'll still be able to work on something else).

Also wanted to mention that I do use headless servers as well. For that, I do prefer a fresh install because I'm not installing a GUI on it or all the kernel sources or most of the development tools, really. Just the bare minimum. And that takes just a couple minutes. A solid system ready to just get the conf files copied over to lock the system down and get the services started. A lot of VPS providers provide slackware 15. I used mint for years because I had to have the latest Virtualbox for win11 but it got to a point where other stuff annoyed me so much on mint that Id rather have a separate dedicated laptop just for win11 just so that I could run my slackware on my main system and do most of my work in a win10 VM. It got to a point with this that it changes too much and I'm tired of it. I couldn't even set a static ip (persistent). They removed ifconfig commands, so have to use ip. systemd is just not my thing. Slackware approves of both ifconfig and ip. Just basic stuff. Even iptables still works. I spent so many years learning stuff and then everything changes. They have this ufw stuff now, I don't want to learn it just to set up a simple firewall! I got tons of notes on iptables and very granular rules.

It would automount my usb's and I hated that so much I put a script in my crontab but guess what? Even the script would not run every 5 minutes. It's like the entire system is rigged or something. I put '/5' at the beginning which means every 5 minutes. It would never run actually lol. For all I know it ships with a backdoored kernel. That's why I plan to recompile my own kernel for this specific laptop. If and when I move back to a desktop, I just plug the NVMe into the slot and reboot into the larger generic kernel (until I recompile a kernel for my desktop too lol). Also im moving to a laptop for a while due to travelling so I need my system to run as efficient as possible without the fan blaring like crazy and this slackware install has been quieter than mint on the same laptop running throttled. It hardly consumes like 1GB ram but somehow my desktop mint system with 64GB RAM and NONE of my VMs running at all:

I believe I found the solution!

in /etc/lilo/conf. I did this after transferring a base system to a thinkpad and had no brightness control. Now I do

Edited:
I tore down that base transfer since that was just a test and this time did an actual transfer of my other slackware system over nc and tar, did all the stuff i needed to do like chroot, modify fstab, mkinitrd, lilo, changed hostname and static ip, etc and as long as that line is in append, i am able to have my entire system transferred effortlessly with brightness control, at least on one of my thinkpads it worked.

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