Happy Birthday Slackware, congrats! Started on Redhat personally, then Mandrake, and finally settled on Gentoo for years. Setting that up for the first time was… interesting.
The best way to get Linux in the era was to get a box of floppies from a guy at the 2600 meeting. Got Slackware in 93 and a goofy little video game made by some guys up i45 in mesquite called Wolfenstein. Wonder what happened to them.
I love Slackware but it really is a relic of days gone past (not in a bad way but a nostalgic way).
Back when Slackware launched you didn’t just download an .iso file and gigabytes of updates/new software from repositories like you do now. The internet was far too slow and data caps too restrictive to download anything serious. This was a time where even RPM-based distributions didn’t have a package manager with proper dependency management. RPM hell was a thing and even Apt was ahead of its time when it came out. You also didn’t have the internet to find information as you know it now, you used HOWTO guides if you were lucky or you actually read the man pages and liked it.
Instead of repositories you downloaded from, you ordered a stack of floppies or CDs via snail mail and you just installed and used whatever software was on them. You would only download additional software if you absolutely needed it, usually on the universities network or from others at your LUG. You might have even gotten CDs on the cover of a magazine, that’s how I got a copy of Red Hat and tried that distro for the first time back in the day. If you were really lucky your ISP would have a quota-free FTP server you could slowly get stuff from but that only became a thing here post-2000.
A nice, curated stack of CDs like Slackware was the absolute bomb in these times and something you got if you were absolutely serious about running Linux on your PC. Having a set was practically a status symbol around other like-minded nerds and being lent them to make a copy was like being gifted their firstborn child. Ubuntu for one became popular partly because of their program to send CDs out to anybody anywhere in the world free of charge, usually with some free merch included to boot, that’s how much we all relied on physical CDs themselves.
Today however, I wouldn’t actively choose to run Slackware anymore. Like the internet itself and mailing physical media, distros have moved on to bigger, better things and unfortunately beyond nostalgia Slackware hasn’t kept up. These days distros like Arch Linux provide a similar nostalgia hit with more modern tools and functionality at your disposal.
As stable or user friendly fedora and debian are, their whole structure due to the way they setup their ecosystem including their package management differ in how to change things system wide as you dont want to go too heavy on it to avoid breaking, especially if you tinker things to where you conflict with its package manegment. Aka your configs vs apts/dnf package managers configs, at some point a conflict will occur to where you will need to fix it.
Slackware lack of package managers creates the initial issue of well now i got to manually take care of the dependencies. However in exchange, the packages are close to the way they were initially developed and your config system wide has significant less competition on what happens to your configs systemwide.
You can make your debian or fedora your system, however slackware gives you that initial power out of the box hence its superb stability + even if i make a mistake i find slackware to be more forgiving to fix the issue.
That was my first distro… in 1993! Because I bought a book with a CD in the back that had the whole thing instead of having to download a bunch of floppies!
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