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 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.
I disagree with suse. suse was the first distro where I was able to get a laptop working completely without having to download additional drivers.
Debian has a lot of other things going for it - but Slackware still beat it by two months, and Linux wouldn’t be the same without it. Worth celebrating! 🎉
You aren’t wrong :)
Also, wasn’t SUSE Linux originally based on Slackware?
Yup.
praise “bob”
If you don’t laugh, you didn’t get it, but if you ONLY laugh, you didn’t get it.
I only got it because I watched Brodie’s video. Although I am thinking of switching to Slackware.
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.
Slackware 10.1 was my first time taking Linux out on the town. Had IBM Thinkpad T23. Thought I was pretty hot stuff. I still have massive respect for the project. They’re one of, if maybe the only, Linux distro out there that comes close to the quality of documentation as FreeBSD and because of that they’re the only distro that still feels like I think Unix felt like, or should feel like… idk maybe that’s nostalgia speaking…
I think the last slack install I did was in 1996; from floppies! <-- beatdown
Okay, so, silly question: What was the first linux distro, regardless of current activity?
TAMU was an early one I used. There were lots that were one and done too so it’s hard to keep track.
I think it was MCC Interim Linux.
Interim Linux would be a neat modern distro name.
Neat! I’ll have to look into that, thanks~
Another one bites the dust 🎵
My first Slackware was 9. My favourite was 13.37. Happy.
