I agree with you, that his article is rather biased. He seems to be of the kind who thinks just because it's something new(ish) in the Linux OS world, and over half the distros are now using it, that *everyone* should use it, as that means it's "progressing". He's stuck in his own little loop of 'I like things this way and that's that' - exactly what he's trying to pin on Slackware and its maintainers and users. Afterall, he saw no one post a message that they started using Slackware after 2001, which to him "suggests" no one hardly has 'started' to use Slackware. I guess ignorance is bliss and not needing to cite such a statement is 'okay' in todays world of twits and foobookers being censored and all being done with the blessing of anyone 'left' or 'woke'...which, after reading that article, I can say I highly suspect the writer to be probably both of.

CONCLUSION: The article wasn't written unbiasedly as it could have been, the writer who blames Slackware and basically its users are stuck in the past while simultaneously proving he blindly seems to accept anything new simply because it's new and is graphical. A distro that has been around this long *MUST* be doing something right and *MUST* have a pretty large base of users and people who help the Owner/Maintainer maintain it, to actually have stayed around this long, yet the writer seems to think that it's just a few eccentric folk who must really love being stuck in the past and are just meanies because they didn't put systemd and took so long to use PAM in the distro.

The article is a partial farce, in my not so humble opinion, written by someone who doesn't think outside the box and probably uses the term 'boomer' but would want to run to a safe space if called a name himself. I give the article and the writer a combined rating of 4.5 out of 10.

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He says:

Well I used Slackware for the first time ever in March 2021 (14.2) and installed -current from Alienbob's liveslak in July 2021.

This newcomer is going to 'stick with it'

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There's a commonly known phrase I like:
"While all progress is change, not all change is progress!"

All the slackpkg issues he had were likely from picking a bad mirror. That's not slackware's fault.

The adduser thing is weird. From what he describes it must be looping here
I can see how a failure from passwd could result in a busy loop, and I can think of a couple of ways to engineer it to fail, but how he did it without trying is beyond me.

Personally, I just use useradd and do them manually.


Much of the rest of what he posts can be dismissed simply as "it's not what I'm used to!"

And, yes the website is in desperate need of being replaced.

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Yeah, it was cutting edge when I bought it. 32gb, 7th gen i7, 1tb nvme SSD and thunderbolt 3. It has been fully supported by Slackware since the day I got it. I changed the battery in it recently, and it's still going strong. As you said, they're great units.

It's kind of funny to watch people complain about their own inability

Kind of goes to show how those same "do it for me tools" have hurt peoples ability to do things.

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There also isn't anything wrong about that. I've been on easy street for about a decade with Mageia. I think easy street just work distroes like Mageia, Manjaro and Mint are excellent too. That's kind of the point though, freedom is.

The my way or the highway approach (windows, apple etc) is not that, and I don't like it. Despite some changes with GNU/Linux the last 20 years it's still not that, although some people might be trying to hijack the whole thing and turn it into my way or the highway, I doubt that is possible in the end.

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It happened to me on Slackware-current soon after PAM was added, and I entered a blank password.

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I agree. Anyone who uses any of the "easy" distros is in a way better place that anyone using proprietary software. That really is the problem with the review on distrowatch. Many people are exploring Linux and it is growing slowly. By giving Slackware a less than honest review, many young people will say no and move on. It's just wrong.

On another note, after one has used Linux as long as I have, you realize at the core, they are all the same. Sure, a different package manager but I can make Arch or Gentoo or Debian and Mint or even Ubuntu, do exactly what I want, it's just the journey each will provide. We are heading in a direction where things are trying to become a one size fits all thing and that's even fine. We "win" when more people join us in whatever capacity. That has helped gaming and other things to become more mainstream on Linux and that is indeed a good thing.

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Well, passwd will exit rc=10 if you do that, but the loop will just run passwd again which will ask you to enter it again, so you wouldn't get the busy loop he described.

passwd uses the system-auth pam stack, and I'm already on record as saying I don't think some of the stuff in there (such as gnome_keyring) is appropriate for that file. I suppose it's possible it's causing some sort of negative interaction, but then why did passwd work for him when he tried it manually outside of the adduser script?

Used to allow blank. Maybe he didn't release <ENTER> quickly.

I had something like this happen, but it was pure PEBKAC for me. When creating my ID on 15 I accidentally pressed enter with a blank PW (or a typo). And I would type it in and got prompted again and again. But I was NOT reading the screen. I then decided to read the screen carefully and figured out what to do. My guess he was on autopilot and refused to pay attention to what he was doing, he was just pressing enter after enter with typo after typo.

As for removing packages, people doing that was rather common in the early days, I did that when all I had was a 20 mg drive, I would skip the X, XAP, K and E packages on install. My guess he last used Slackware around 96 or 97 and installed it like he was on a 386.

I do not agree with his conclusions at all, but it has 2 things going for it. He included its very high user rating and the saying "all press is good". Also distrowatch did donate some funds to Slackware a couple of years ago, so I am hopping he was not biased but just did not like the distro

Why would anyone care about Debian&CoWatch?

These guys need that their "page hit rank" to look like it really means something, that is the reason why these reviews are written. Let them spend their life being guinea pigs for those distros that post-release update 800 packages!

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This "review" was a joke, and I think khronosschoty hit the nail on the head:Exactly--the author adopts a friendly, polite tone, then proceeds to dissemble at every opportunity.

E.g., he uses the fact that he witnessed (on Slashdot & reddit) a few old-time Slackers reminiscing about the 90s as "evidence" to jump to the conclusion that "not many new people have wandered into the Slackware community in the past 20 years." This goes beyond illogical to the point of being anti-logical.

For the record, like some others in this very thread, I "discovered" Slackware only relatively recently. (2017 in my case.) Looking back, I feel that I was blinded by just this very type of FUD in the before-times. I had been effing around w/ Red Hat, PCLOS, etc, and had avoided Slackware, because I had seen so much talk about it being "for experts only" and "not for newbs," etc. Once I took the plunge, however, I discovered that that was all bullshit.

So, I guess Slackware's adoption of PAM, elogind, ffmpeg, etc. just in the five short years that I've personally been using it doesn't count as change? Utter BS. A more accurate (and honest) statement would be: "Slackware refuses to fix what isn't broken."

It's sad that such a prominent site as Distrowatch promulgates such disingenuous tripe, rather than providing an honest review. I get that Slackware might not be everybody's cup of tea, but an honest reviewer would air his/her objections based on facts--not on half-truths, obfuscations, and outright falsehoods. I can't speak to this guy's motives, but the verdict is clear: this is less a review than a hit-piece, attempting to dissuade people from even trying Slackware.

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And Plasma 5, don't forget that. KDE has always been one of the most innovative common parts of GNU/Linux, Slackware could easily have dropped KDE and went a more conservative path, but it didn't. And there are tons of components in Slackware that proves exactly that IT DOES embrace useful and good new things with good designs, and it's often far ahead of other distroes too. It's just not a "hype train" distro.

I do worry about Slackware attracting new users, but what percentage of young people are choosing linux, anyway?

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