Here’s a good up-to-date installation guide which mentions the most common pitfalls:
https://ratfactor.com/slackware/new-computer
Note that the author uses Slackware’s default elilo bootloader. I prefer installing grub, which will be the default in the next release.

To install grub during installation:
https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/howto-install-grub-on-slackware-with-efi-4175727510-print/

Afterwards, you’ll probably want to:

• change to default runlevel 4 in /etc/inittab, to boot into a graphical desktop
• install and setup slackpkgplus, a plugin to Slackware’s package manager that lets you use additional repositories, especially the alienbob repo
• install flatpak from that repo to make your life easier

But I can’t stress enough that if you’re just looking for a good, functional Linux distro that works as you’d expect, this isn’t the right one.
It’s a museum piece. You’ll face issues that other distro’s maintainers have solved or hidden away long ago.
It takes a special kind of curiosity and interest in the history of Linux to enjoy this as a new user.
And the only reward is an operating system so simple in design you’ll soon know every part of it inside and out, and which then won’t change on you or do anything unexpected.

LOL Sorry, I had to laugh. I started with Slackware back in the 90s, and I finally moved away from it in 2017 or 2018.

Installing it is easy. Where it starts to get headachy is dealing with dependencies when you install something that isn’t a standard package. (I remember, I wanted to install the Ubiquiti Unifi software, and I was just like…“I do not want to deal with this.”) Then, I’d get nervous about updates, “What is this going to break?” And that’s bad from a security point of view.

I understand they do have some dependency management now, so it might be better than it used to be.

I ran it on my desktop, laptop, and my server. The laptop and desktop got switched first, initially to Kubuntu until a few years ago, but now they run Debian. The server was last to be switched from Slackware, and for that I went to Debian. (Debian on the laptop and desktop came later.)

Don’t get me wrong, I loved Slackware, and subscribed to the automatic CD delivery for years. But Debian has just been so much easier to maintain, and more mainstream, so more things are packaged for it. It’s pretty rare that I can’t find a .deb for a piece of software.

Why not both?

Good idea, awful execution.

There’s dozens of us! DOZENS!

alone and very far away from the real world?

good one!

Its what was before red hat. Then red hat became IBM and it was all there was.

Slackware was my first and I didn’t know that package managers existed (or maybe they didn’t at the time) to resolve dependencies and even if they did, they probably lagged on versions. I learned true dependency hell when trying to build my own apache, sendmail, etc from source while missing a ton of dependency libraries (or I needed newer versions) and then keeping things relatively up to date. Masochistic? Definitely for me, but idk how much of that was self inflicted by not using the package tool. Amazing learning at the time. This would have been mainly Slackware 3.x and 4.x. I switched to Debian (not arch BTW).

You certainly learn a lot about paths, environment variables and compile options.

Caption Appropriately

Ummm…

“Arch users about to update without reading the news page”

How’d I do? Lol

Someone currently developing the next mainstream distro, writing the kernel as we speak.

Because Slackware doesn’t have dependency resolution in the base system.
Additional software you install from slackbuilds includes dependency info, but dependencies that are in the base system aren’t considered.
The maintainers test against a full installation and anyone giving support assumes you have a full system. You can do a more minimal install but then you’re on your own. Similar to installing Arch without following the wiki.

Cover of Utopia Zukunftsroman #299, 1961 by Karl Stephan. I’d never heard of it but it reminded me of the cover art for Truckfighters’ album “Gravity X” (which itself is from the cover of an issue of Space:1999). Turns out he didn’t do that cover but he did actually do some work for Space:1999.

Looks familiar, like every second book from sci-fi golden age. You can read Sargasso of Space.

It’s a unique combination of extreme stability and extreme KISS philosophy.
Sparse updates are a selling point for some people. You do get timely security updates, but you don’t get “version number must go up”.
For installing additional software there are 5 package managers that I know of, 4 of which resolve dependencies.
The base system doesn’t need a fancy one because the installer already resolves all dependencies.
And as for support, there’s well-written documentation installed with the system, and linuxquestions.org has a very active community where the main dev and the maintainers post regularly.
It’s certainly not a good distro for most people, but it’s the perfect one for roughly 10000 users worldwide.

Patrick Volkerding

Slackware users love the fact that precious Patrick builds the entire thing himself. They also really like the fact that it uses no modern Linux technologies, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

I mean, if you’re an arch user you probably should get it, given it’s kinda the same train if thought that brings most arch users to choose that.

The point is being a barebones system you can do what you want on top of, it tries to avoid making any choice for you.

I’ve kinda often thought of it as the step between LFS and Gentoo/Arch for users who want the most control over their system.

I prefered slackware over red hat from near the beginning. Debian was so fringe that no one I know had heard of it until around 2000. It was one of many roll your own versions that people played with. It eventually caught on but at the beginning there was only slackware and red hat in the main stream. They were so close together at the time that at the dial up ISP I worked for somone unziped a slackware etc directory over the top of a red hat installation and it booted and worked. Not that it didn’t have some really bizzare log files.

The annoying younger sibling?

After a run of RedHat - Fedora - OpenBSD - OSX to about 2007, I gave Debian more of a try in the form of #! Linux. That was a great minimalist distro. Ever since then it’s just one Debian variant or another. It does the job with minimal fuss.

It really helps that I don’t push the hardware with shiny new equipment or need much in 3D drivers. Linux Mint on desktops, Debian servers, Ubuntu only for driver issues, Raspian/Armbian on SBCs.

Hell i still run it. Apache server with no M or P. Uptime measured in decades