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Niche Distro Users: Why?
(lemmy.ml)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
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 :)