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Niche Distro Users: Why?
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2024
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I daily drive Slackware.
What drove me to it was curiosity. "How the fuck does a distro without dependency resolution even work? And why are people still using it?" As it turns out, it's working very well actually. And I am now one of those people.
I like to tinker and solve puzzles. Installing the most old-fashioned distro on a modern convertible laptop, then bashing it till it looks and feels modern was a fun puzzle.
And it turned out to be a system I can daily drive on any device. Cause contrary to popular belief, you don't need to hunt down dependencies manually every time you install something, that would be dumb. Once it's set up, it's actually very low maintenance and the knowledge I gained about its quirks will likely still be applicable in 10 years.
What's the Slackware way of managing package dependencies, then?
For Slackware itself, you install all available software up front. That way, all dependencies are resolved.
You then just hide the stuff you don't need from your DE using its menu editor, or ignore it.
During an update, the package manager updates all installed packages, installs all packages that were added to the repo and removes all packages that are obsolete.
For additional software, there is a semi-official repo that's very similar to Arch's AUR.
And like the AUR, it offers several helper scripts and additional package managers that do dependency resolution.
Or you use Flatpaks.
That's unnecessary and inefficient, you can install a small subset and go from there.
Until you start installing stuff from Slackpackages, whose dependency info assumes everything in the default install is there and doesn't need mentioning.
Or new packages are added to the repo which depend on something you didn't install.
How long do software updates take then, if you're updating the entire software stack? I can imagine the answer being anywhere from "hours" to "same as the incremental software updates on other distros"
There are very few updates. It's more stable than Debian. And the repo isn't huge, maybe twice the size of other distros default installed size.
Cool, thanks. Didn't realize you can use this neat trick :)
I see what you did there
Just use Gentoo mate /s