transition to slack for a newbie
 

Hi, i'm a newbie using slackware 10.2, this is the 1st time i tried slack, & i noticed its very different frm other distros (i've tried ubuntu,RH9,fedora in the past)
the 1st thing i noticed is there isn't any logo or a wallpaper or an icon not even a name in the loader(lilo) that mentions slackware!

i've seen many fans of slack in this website, what is abt it that stands out?

Wow. Loaded question.

The short answer: You.

You make Slackware what it is. It is maintain by a individual ("All Hail Pat!") but you change it into what you want.

Have you noticed that it does not even start X as a default? You have to configure it, and start it.

EVERYTHING in Slackware is customizable, all the way to making it unusable.

Toy with it. Change it. Make it yours.

Then try one of your old distros. You'll be saying "Why can't I..." or "Hey, I can do...". Slackware shows you how Linux works, shows you the guts of the OS, and makes you dig in elbows deep in the muck and the mire.

As I said, You are what this distro is about. Make it yours.

Slackware is different. Depending on your own personal tastes, you might find this either good or bad. I would say that it doesn't matter whether you use Slackware or Fedora so long as you're comfortable with the OS.

Slackware is popular because of the simplicity of the default init scripts and the way the configuration files are laid out to make editing by hand easy. Other distros tend to write their own scripts to generate conf files while Slackware leaves everything to the user. It makes adminning a system much easier when you know what goes where and it's very easy to customize the boot sequence on Slackware to leave out unwanted stuff (just make the particular rc.<whatever> script unexecutable).

On the other hand, unless you're willing to risk compiling from source (and believe me while it works 90% of the time, there are some software that will fail to compile on your system for a variety of reasons which might be fixable or not) or use third-party packages, you might find the selection of software on the main distribution a bit thin compared to other major distros. There's also no auto dependency checking so you deal with installing dependencies by hand as well.

That's because Pat loves simplicity, too, and leaves things the
way their creators made them. (well, there's a couple of sanity
patches for software that is no longer maintained by their owner).


Cheers,
Tink

In a nutshell pretty much every Slack system is more or less a custom system. It's up to the user to set things up the way they want it to be.

Except for a couple of neccessary patches, Slack is a vanilla distro, leaving it up to the user to make whatever changes they want to make to get it to the system they want.

Simplicity is a beautiful thing.