Or HL2 Episode 3 hey Valve your customers want to know what happened with Alyx's father,
is he dead or what?

Hahaha, now that's funny.

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HL2 (Orange Box) might be my all time favorite video game I still play it tho I have thousands of hours in it. I have to assume that Alyx's Dad is dead because even if they have enough graphics to work with to give him limited mobility, I have yet to hear an Impersonator do a good job on Robert Guillaume's (Eli Vance) voice. I suppose they could outfit him with one of those "throat twangers" that sounds like a kazoo but that might be creepy for such a warm and passionate role, but the real deal is gone as of 2017.

I hope it isn't too soon 'cuz I liked a lot of the roles Mr. Guillaume polayed, but there could be some benefits to Eli's passing

--- YouTube - Funeral Scene ---

8 ^ P

Depends on your definition of death.

If it stayed sensible but it was never updated anymore, I would probably still use it and maintain it for myself.
If it went fully bonkers with degenerate CoC shenanigans and co, then I would not only laugh at everyone involved, but also call them names.

I would probably still use Slackware though, I just would lose all respect for the maintainers.
It's like jaywalking, technically its against the law, or at least an infraction, but if a copper actually gave you a ticket for it, it's the copper who would need to be derided harshly.

Yeah, it's kind of a tangent for the growing of CoCs in the free software world in general, but, that's just how it is. A CoC is not binding and anyone who seriously considers adhering to it should be shamed and laughed out of the room every time, even if the CoC is fully integrated into the project.

They're not law, they're guidelines.

To clarify somewhat, this was not initiated as some kind of veiled attack on that user, just an observation that the quote doesn't really make any sense to me and it seems more like a proclamation from an uninformed position (I feel the clarification is necessary, because I'm certainly not a fan of that user as you seem to be).

Fair enough, but it doesn't make that very sermonic, final and informed sounding statement in your quote any truer.

And that's my point - the person you quoted was simply opining and stating in effect that Slackware was not "easy" for others, when they should have limited the scope of the statement just to themselves.

I would definitely recommend it, if I were asked to recommend something to a user who is serious about learning and doesn't want to just hop on the Debian/Red Hat/systemd/gnome automagic bandwagon...

I've never assumed that I've known what's best for someone else, I've never made assumptions about anyone's skill level. So I see no reason to not recommend Slackware.

You are correct in this point. As far as I can tell, that particular user had little to no experience with Slackware [he also disliked Salix because it was too slow for him, he didn't like the installer, no minimal .iso and other issues].

I'm not sure that's totally true though. In spite of the fact that this particularly user had, as far as I can tell, little to no experience of Slackware, I don't think they would have found it hard since they were an expert in *nix. It was more to do with the fact they had no patience for manual dependency handling and were a big fan of Debian [pre-systemd]. I think the key word in that quote re Slackware is not "ease-of-use" but "focus", e.g. Ubuntu's focus [or raison d'etre] is ease-of-use, Debian's is free software etc. Slackware's focus is not ease-of-use, it's to be as Unix-like as possible and give the user control over their system, whether it is easy or not is relative. There's a difference between an OS's focus being ease-of-use, and an OS being easy. The first is definitive, the second subjective.

I think this is more of an old school way of thinking - not that there's anything wrong with that whatsoever. I also think it's relative to how much one knows about the user. There are certain people who I definitely would not recommend Slackware to, e.g. my wife who is uncomfortable using Mint or one of my best friends who found Ubuntu to be "obtuse" and being "difficult on purpose". These days, as Linux is becoming a little more common on the desktop, I feel it is the duty of those asked to be realistic in their recommendations and tailor them to those asking, since Linux is being increasingly used by people without *nix backgrounds. If I were asked to recommend a distro to someone I didn't know, I would probably give three Linux OSs as guidance, their relative focuses, and let the user choose. But for most people I know personally, recommending Slackware would just be wasting their time.

So again, I'm missing the bit where his opinion on Slackware is somehow signature worthy.

This may be your opinion, but is not an opinion shared by many others outside of that forum. But if more than 5000(?) or so posts of chastisement, baiting, bullying and advice to "read the manual" and "search the web" amounts to "expert in *nix" to you, then I suppose there's not much point in arguing.

Anyway, yes it's offtopic, so that's all...

On the contrary, I'm more than happy - to wit fascinated - to have your opinion on it. There is no doubt whatsoever that he was a controversial figure. In fact he and I had a minor clash when we first spoke [which he later apologised for]. The 'expertise' was more to do with the fact that, as far as I saw, he solved nearly every problem [which wasn't a cue to RTFM] with empirical accuracy, as well my own in the email exchanges we shared. This, along with the information he imparted about his previous employment, and his experiences in both computing and academia, led me to that conclusion. Nevertheless, I'm completely aware that the term 'expert' is also relative: I don't know if he would have used that term to describe himself. I imagine not.

As you wish. Nevertheless, I don't feel the forum would mind our exchange on this since the topic of this thread is tired and useless and the OP has now been permanently banned. It may be bad form, but it's no worse than how the thread began.

Almost spilled the coff^H^H^H^Hbeer

I was led to believe he had passed on, thus any further discussion would be in poor taste and won't change a thing. Anyone who wants to judge that user, can simply search for their posts and the 5000+ results will speak for themselves.

...

Anyway, I'm still of the firm opinion that it's ok to suggest anything you want to a new user. It's up to the end user to determine their skill level and if a certain Linux distribution is somehow beyond them or not. Otherwise we have this situation with new users - irrespective of their needs, aspirations and ability - being herded towards Ubuntu, et al by default - from my perspective that's not a good thing. (Salix would also be a good choice).

It also depends on that new user, what they want to do and what they expect. For "family" systems, it shouldn't matter, because you will probably end up administering it anyway - so you will want something you're very familiar with and can support easily and quickly.

For everyone else, there are too many different types of users. I, as a rule, don't believe in "converting" anyone to anything, but if someone asks about trying out some Linux distribution, I would recommend Slackware over all others due to it being a very simple and robust system which just works out of the box. Once you've made the edit to innittab to start at runlevel 4, logged in to KDM and got a KDE desktop with a web browser, you have a ready to go system which performs very well and has almost everything you want preinstalled. The difficulty may then come with installing anything else - while I accept that many users struggle with the command line, installing a slackbuild is not exactly rocket science, but I accept that e.g. FreeBSD's ports system is in many ways easier, resolves dependencies and has less steps for the user. It doesn't matter if they stay with it, or whether or not it's suitable as almost no user stays with the first Linux distribution they try anyway.

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Too bad, I notice this post got a good success but I have not understood the reference/joke...

I suddenly feel very old.

Once upon a time, Necraft famously declared that *BSD was dying, and a meme was born. It turns out that their ability in predicting the future is second only to that of Michael Fish.

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^ Thank you very much GazL for this background!

Being herded towards Ubuntu is not necessarily a bad thing. Of course Ubuntu has its bad points, but it is a great place to start and as you rightly say, almost no user stays with the first distro they try. These days a lot of people are coming from Windows/Mac and they would, not unfairly, expect systems that behave like Windows or Mac. The good thing about Ubuntu is that it's not too different from Windows so as to be off-putting for new users. The danger with recommending Slackware et al is that it will just put Windows users off Linux if they think that all Linux is like that. They may revert to the comfortable and familiar and not be bothered to try other distros.

I suppose one could propose an alternative first choice. Salix isn't a bad option as you say. Maybe MX Linux. But from what I can see, the Ubuntu forums are mostly a new user cattle ring and people don't tend to stay there for that long.

Indeed. As for the family systems point, I knew of one mostly clueless older gentleman who ran Gentoo and it was administrated by his son. But yes, maybe MX or Salix, anything that doesn't encourage the use of sudo on single-user systems [does Salix? I can't remember].

I think the harder problem is getting people to care. If they are the kind of people that just want to 'get things done', or are used to things installing the easy way, they will just go that route and installing a Slackbuild will seem like an unnecessary fumble. In essence though, I take your point, there is definitely an argument for not deterring new users from Slackware, but if they are Windows users I would say there is less of a chance that they will get on with the OS than with others.

There's been ample activity supporting the currently supported stable releases with updates as well as activity in -current. You could start using the latter any time you wish.

So, I'd say "no, it isn't".

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