Kind of reminds me of Tim McGraw's song:
The 'little gal', of course, being Slackware

The point is very simple.

It is completely normal to install additional software. Any major distribution has a repository for that. An official one. That is supported and updated.

In Slackware there is nothing officially available beyond the default full install.

Nada. Zilch. None.

All random package or slackbuild collections are not supported by Slackware in any way. There is no an officially supported libreoffice package for example. That makes extending the default install horribly inefficient. One can find it cool to compile dozens of additional packages and maintaining his own repository but

Cool /= efficient.

This is not a criticism. This is a fact.


Cheers

Open Office works fine. The binary RPM download can be transformed by rpm2tgz and installed with installpkg. Simple, one download, installed easily even at places with no Internet connection. Same goes for Slackware itself.

As far as Linux goes, I started with Slackware, added other Linux from time to time, but all Linux here is currently Slackware Linux. *BSD is another matter, though: FreeBSD has earned respect here, compact disc and pkg stupidity aside.

What's not efficient is spending three days trying to find out why I can't encode a video because some snot-nosed, blow-dried, compi-sci freshman with two years of PHP programming under his belt built a package using the wrong build flags -- but hey, he was an official maintainer of an official package in an official repo, and it only took me 30 seconds to install.

I'm actually rather reluctant to install code that I can't build myself and I feel it is quite productive knowing what dependencies are required and having an idea ahead of time what issues might be encountered when using the software.

3 members found this post helpful.

asking such a question in this forum will give you somewhat biased answers...

I do sometimes wish the whole of the linux community would come to a consensus on software and packaging delivery. One thing I love about Slackware is that if I can find an installation package for some software I just look for the source and build it myself.

When you think this can't or didn't happen already on Slackware try to grep for "Recompiled with" on your Changelog.txt of choice. If you also think that in cases like that other distros somehow can't recompile that package with the needed flags you are also wrong.

Being bitten several times in the past by poorly written slackbuilds on SBo I now tend to first read the script, then read at least the ./configure --help, then run the script as user and make sure it will properly redirect the "make install" and finally build the package. Sbopkg - no thanks.


Cheers

I've had great results with the sbopkg utility. No complaints from me.

re the car analogy I am feeling pedantic tonight so I should point out that Graham Chapman was a member of Monty Python whereas Colin Chapman founded Lotus Cars.

2 members found this post helpful.

Would you care to give any indication on how far in the past this was?

If you think that the members of this forum didn't already know this, you are wrong.

Giving up Slackware is like trying to get MadTV's Stan McNer to give up coffee.

A few years for sure. But two weeks ago SBo reminded me again that I can't trust it. Not a big deal, a simple libxrandr gui called zarfy. I stumbled upon it in a hurry and quickly built the package. It worked on the system where it was built but didn't work on the test machine. Running the slackbuild as user showed that it was trying to mkdir /usr/share/zarfy instead of /tmp/SBo/package-zarfy/usr/share/zarfy resulting in a broken package.

As I said not a big deal but obviously nothing changed on SBo.

Cheers

Quite correct, I can only excuse myself by saying they were both geniuses.

And had Graham Chapman made cars they too would have been as memorable but probably for their quirkiness.