This week the Slackware Linux project is celebrating its 30th anniversary. It is the oldest Linux distribution that is still in active maintenance and development.
I think I still have disks for Slackware 11 and 13 floating around somewhere. I even ran 13 for almost 2 years as a daily driver… And then got pissed off trying to update packages.
I’ll admit that these days I just run Ubuntu, because it’s easy, and it works without hours of googling how to fix some random dependency that I can’t actually find for some reason.
I mean sure, but Debian is far more active, relevant, and only like two months younger…
When I started playing around with Linux 25 years ago Debian and APT was a small revolution in how good it worked out of the box.
I tried to get into Red hat and SUSE and I always wanted up in trouble even before I got any Windows manager up and running. Don’t get me started on RPM and dependency hell
Debian just worked. I had stuff up n running BEFORE I had to go down the rabbit hole to understand how all things was connected.
For a beginner that was a game changer.