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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • Doesn’t work on Guix, or at least isn’t in the repos and didn’t work at all some time ago. Something to do with the way Plasma expects the files stem to be versus how Guix implements it. Nix makes it work so it must be possible, not sure whether anyone’s bothered to port it over yet though.





  • I tend to use either Newsboat or Elfeed. The first one is command line, the second is Emacs. So they’re both text-based. Might not be precisely what you’re looking for, but with the right choice of terminal font and easy-on-the-eyes colours, I find it a pleasant reading experience without distraction.






  • We don’t install packages without dependancy management, for the most part. We use one of the half-dozen or so pkgtools wrappers made by community members that interface with SBo and handles the dependencies for us (examples include slapt-get, slpkg, and sbotools). Also, Flatpak/Distrobox/Nix etc are all available and easy enough to install if slackbuilds.org doesn’t have what I need (rare tbh).


  • Debian and Void (and Void is iffy. The TTY installer is easy enough though, and it’s basically good to go out of the box if you get the glibc iso with Xfce). None of the other base distros are super user-friendly in terms of installation, though I’d add Endeavour OS as an honorary member of the group since it’s essentially Arch with a good installer, a friendly community, and nice defaults.




  • He replied to a post in the Slackware forum back at the end of January telling folk he had terminal cancer. No idea how things have progressed since then but I know he was already very unwell at that point and I’ve not seen him crop up since that time. I imagine he’s either spending his remaining time with his family or he’s already at rest. Either way, losing Steve is a huge blow to the community. Wish I could have met him and thanked him in person for his videos. They were so helpful to me in the early days of running Slackware.



  • The key is in the name. Whoever distributes the software to you determines whether it’s commercial or community. Where they get it from is irrelevant because they’re the ones distributing it to you.

    Ubuntu can’t be made closed-source because of the licensing of the software they use from upstream. Red Hat is still not closed source, for instance. Everyone who gets it gets access to the source code. But if Ubuntu went away or whatever then downstream distributions would be in a spot of trouble. They could rebase on Debian (which is what Ubuntu is based upon), but how hard that would be varies wildly depending on distro. Linux Mint already have a Debian edition, for instance. No problem there. Pop OS would certainly be able to make it work as well; they’re a very professional operation. But take, for example, Endeavour OS. It’s Arch with a graphical installer and some nice defaults. Without Arch Linux (which is almost certainly not going anywhere and is a community distro) they’d have some real problems. There’s no upstream to Arch to rebase on. They’d have to so fundamentally change everything to accomodate a whole new base and packaging system that they’d basically be making a whole new distro.


  • The Slackware community has produced about 8 package manager front-ends that handle dependency resolution, so it’s not an issue at all and hasn’t been for over a decade. The big thing with Slackware is an emphasis on simplicity of design over ease of use and an expectation that the user will make all the decisions regarding how their system is maintained. I love it, use it on my main machine (Void on my laptop, Ubuntu on my server). It’s taught me a lot about operating systems in general and Linux in particular, and it lets me do whatever I like. I use sbotools and flatpak for my 3rd party software, the former being a ports-like interface to slackbuilds.org (like the AUR for Slackware, but far smaller and with a lot more quality control). Works great, no surprises, boots fast, rock solid and dependable.