Good Lord, just PM me your address and I'll throw a USB stick in the post.

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Lysander666 is closer to you than I am, hazel. I live on the North Coast of Canada. I am very happy to send you my Slackware 14.2 DVD if you wish. PM your address and I will send it your way.

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@Hazel,
Well, heck, I'll burn a -current DVD and send it to you. Might take a while to get there, but it will be worth the wait.

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That's more than generous of you all! But do you think my way would work?

Yes, you could make it work that way... but in all honesty I'd take up the offer from one of the posters above... and if none of them follow thru for whatever reason, I also offer to send you a physical copy of whichever version you want.

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It depends on your goals and what you need running on your system right away.

There is a small installer that only contains the setup program and needed things for installation except for packages. It is 25MB. It can be found under the usb-and-pxe-installers/ on your favorite mirror.

As for getting a bootable, networkable system, the easiest way would be to install the a/, l/, and n/ series of packages. a/ is considered the base install, l/ is for libraries, and n/ is for networking. You could definitely slim it down much further as forum member nobodino has it down to 26 packages for a base system (although, this doesn't include networking, which would add another 5 packages -- and another 7 to be able to use slackpkg).

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Now that looks like a really smart way to proceed and certainly easier than what I was suggesting. I've just been reading the usb boot text from a mirror site and it looks like a simple job. I've got a spare usb key that I can use; I last used it to install Crux 3.3 a few months ago. OK, I'll try that. Should be fun.

The sets I had written down provisionally were a, ap, d, l, n, x and xap. But I'll only need some of ap, xap, d and n. I know by now which networking programs I actually use and which development tools I'll need. You get that knowledge if you use LFS a lot. I'll take all the libraries though; saves trouble with dependencies later on.

PS: Image captured. But I'm not copying it onto a stick late in the evening when I'm tired. That's asking for trouble! Do it tomorrow.

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My proposal is to change the thread title "How would you persuade me to use your Linux distribution" and just move this to Linux general. The lack of sense is just overwhelming. I have no idea what is "debian complexity". I used debian - don't think it is more complex than any other distro. I am using mainly Slackware, but as well I can use Debian, CentOS - just any other Linux distribution. Just please don't overemphasize the differences between Linux distributions. There are not different kind of species. Persuade OP? Hm, I would make promise once OP decide to use Slackware it will obtain T-shirt with Slackware logo. I hope I am enough persuasive.

Salix installer is much smaller, since you have that limit.
https://salixos.org/download.html

You could try downloading AlienBob's Slackware Live Xfce Edition (32-bit/670 MB - 64-bit/692 MB). They fit in a CD-ROM. If I remember correctly, AlienBob's Slackware Live has a 'setup2hd' script which installs the Slackware Live edition to the hard disk.

So, with that installation to hard disk, you can move on later and complete the full Slackware setup.

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This is the only Slackware Live version that doesn't offer the setup2hd script. Darth Vader did some work to allow it to be installed to the hard drive, but it is not supported by Alien Bob.

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@Hazel,
A salesman at my work many years ago now showed me Slackware running on his laptop, It impressed me greatly.

More to the point, I had dialup at that time and NOT even 56K so bringing in a cd took ages. What he did was bring a spare hard drive in to work and use their high speed to bring in the iso he needed. Then he put it on the drive and took it home.

You have a thumb drive so is there a friend that will make the download for you?

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Perhaps there is a LUG close at hand that can help you make the download?

http://lugslist.com/

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Good luck on your quest, hazel. Do keep this thread updated with your progress.

If one defines 'complex' as the opposite of 'simple', it makes a bit more sense:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_p..._of_Simplicity

Exactly! "simple" is like "free": it has two completely different meanings and that causes endless confusion. We all know how difficult it is to explain "free software" to people who only use proprietary software but often get it "for free" from pirate websites.

Now the word "simple" originally came from the Latin simplex, meaning a sheet of papyrus or parchment that was written on without being folded. I suppose nowadays that would be called folio or foolscap. If it was folded in two before writing on it, it was called duplex. So simple in this sense means uncomplicated (or what an earlier poster in this thread called "no f***ery"). But "simple" is often used today to mean "easy".

These are not only two different meanings; they are actually opposed. An OS is easiest to use when everything is done for you and you can use it without thinking. But that isn't possible without a huge amount of internal complications. Someone has to do the work! If you're not going to do it then the software must. Conversely, the more simply the software is put together internally, the more work you have to do.

Debian is indeed easy to use. It's a very good-tempered system that seldom goes wrong, and that's why I have always liked it. But it certainly isn't simple inside. It's simpler than Windows (because any Linux distro is simpler than Windows!) but there is still a lot in there that I do not understand the workings of. And that bothers me.

What I call simplicity is to understand exactly how my software is put together, because even after working with computers for 30 years, I still don't trust them.

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