idk about 2025 but as of a few years ago, Slackware used to not have a dependency resolver in whatever it uses to download packages. You had to resolve dependencies manually.
Luckily I switched to Gentoo and 3 years later after my system was done compiling, it was already out of date so when I used emerge to update my system, it borked itself because it was so out of date.
Slackware’s package manager is extremely easy to use:
slackpkg upgrade-all upgrades all installed packages slackpkg install-new installs all packages that were added to the repo slackpkg clean-system uninstalls all packages that were removed from the repo
That’s not really the point. The point this post is making is that third party software is often not available as a package for your distro. It’s been a minute since I used Slackware, but I doubt you can find neatly built tgz slackware packages of Steam or the Nvidia drivers.
I know Slackware has slackbuilds and you can install sbopkg to search for packages and automatically build them, but that goes a bit beyond “just use your package manager”.
It’s Slackware’s approach to dependency resolution. You don’t need to resolve dependencies on your system if you just install every package in the repo.
The installed size is under 15 GB, and you get a system that works equally well for a desktop as for a server with lots of app choices out of the box.
(Throwing the kitchen sink at you was the common way to install Linux in the old days, before quick Internet)
it’s 2025, what popular distro makes it not easy?
Nix
For nvidia? Alpine Linux. It’s so hard there is 0 support outside of nouveau
(I mean, Alpine uses MUSL instead of GLIBC, so expected)
For AMD? doas apk add linux-firmware-amdgpu mesa mesa-tools vulkan-loaders xf86-video-amdgpu There, you’re good to go(wiki also tells you that)
Merkste selber
idk about 2025 but as of a few years ago, Slackware used to not have a dependency resolver in whatever it uses to download packages. You had to resolve dependencies manually.
Luckily I switched to Gentoo and 3 years later after my system was done compiling, it was already out of date so when I used emerge to update my system, it borked itself because it was so out of date.
Yes, but Slackware. That’s obviously intentional
And OP did specify “popular”, which Slackware hasn’t been since the late 90s
Gentoo, LFS, Slackware.
popular
if you’re using any of those you can’t complain about having to run a few command lines
Slackware’s package manager is extremely easy to use:
slackpkg upgrade-allupgrades all installed packagesslackpkg install-newinstalls all packages that were added to the reposlackpkg clean-systemuninstalls all packages that were removed from the repoAnd that’s all.
That’s not really the point. The point this post is making is that third party software is often not available as a package for your distro. It’s been a minute since I used Slackware, but I doubt you can find neatly built tgz slackware packages of Steam or the Nvidia drivers.
I know Slackware has slackbuilds and you can install sbopkg to search for packages and automatically build them, but that goes a bit beyond “just use your package manager”.
That reads easy but what’s with installing all packages that were added to a repo? How does that help anything?
It’s Slackware’s approach to dependency resolution. You don’t need to resolve dependencies on your system if you just install every package in the repo.
The installed size is under 15 GB, and you get a system that works equally well for a desktop as for a server with lots of app choices out of the box.
(Throwing the kitchen sink at you was the common way to install Linux in the old days, before quick Internet)
That’s a horrendous approach since probably two decades. They shouldn’t slack so hard.
LFS is not a distro and I highly doubt it’s popular as well.