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Why is openSUSE so... weird?
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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Most modern distros are either new distro trying to have more modern sensibilities, distros based off of Debian, Arch, or Fedora, or occasionally original things that are okay with being superficially similar to one of those while doing things differently at lower levels. OpenSUSE is one of the few remaining distros from the olden days that has been independent and doing their own thing for decades without spawning a bunch of forks or dying off. If you want to try something even older and crazier Slackware is sure an experience.
Slackware's package manager doesn't even do dependency resolution. I respect the fact that it's managed to keep existing this long and that so much of what it did inspired other distros, but I honestly have no idea why anyone would use it in 2023. Imo dependency resolution is the main reason to even have a package manager, without that I might as well install everything by cloning random git repos. If you want packages compiled from source, why not just use Gentoo (or Source Mage? Idk much about it, but I read through their website and it seems neat).
That being said, if anyone uses Slackware, I'd love to know why. It's survived this long, surely it must be doing something right.
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.