--- layout: post title: The Switch To Slackware date: 2015-05-18 category: Linux description: The process of how I switched from Debian to Slackware, discussing the why and the how. comments: yes --- For the majority of my Linux user experience I have been a Debian Linux user. The first distribution of Linux I ever used was Damn Small Linux back in 2002. Following that I tried an installation of Gentoo Linux based on the recommendation of a friend of mine from school. Being a complete novice to Linux, I failed miserably at installing Gentoo. After that I tried out (in no particular order) Slackware, Fedora, Gentoo (again), Ubuntu, and finally Debian. I fell in love with the Debian Linux distribution almost immediately. I have been a hard core Debian user since 2004 until now. When I first discovered Debian, I found it to be user friendly, compact, and stable. Over the years the Debian community has grown immensely, and that friendliness I valued disappeared with the masses of new users. For the passed year or so I ran Debian Jessie while it was the Testing branch. I noticed that Debian was no longer the compact installation it once was with all the new and extra dependencies. Upon reinstalling I found it very much a struggle to strip down a Debian system without removing large quantities of the system. All that remains is Debian's stability. That is great and all except the software in the Stable branch is so old, you are forced to run the Testing or Unstable branch to do anything of consequence. This is great for a server environment, but I have no servers at the moment and the only machine I own is a laptop. I want to be able to use my laptop. I do not want to fight the battle of dependencies while trying to install the newer software I need to develop other software, or to play media, or to play the latest games. Last weekend I decided I was going to do something about my frustration and move to a new distribution. I decided I was going to install and use whichever distribution I picked for a few days in a virtual machine. I would install and configure this new distribution to function as my stand in Desktop. I tried this with a few distributions, namely, Free-BSD and Slackware. Both distributions ran smoothly in the virtual environments, but only one was able to recognize enough of the hardware on my now 5 year old laptop in order to complete a full installation. Free-BSD was scratched off the list and I was left with Slackware. As a result I have fallen in love with a new distribution to me, which just so happens to be the oldest active Linux distribution out there. So far I have had a few scuffles with Slackware because of my poor knowledge of the Slackware way. I ended up installing Slackware64 14.1. My laptop is purring like a kitten after a 3.18.13 Linux kernel compile, configuring Xorg, installing multilib support, and acclimating to Slackware's package management. Not only is my laptop running smoothly, but it is running faster than it did with Debian. I even have hardware that stopped working for unapprent reason in Debian, working again. My full installation of Slackware is at 11GB- 5GB less disk space used than Debian prior to wiping my hard disk. From now on I highly recommend that everyone new to Linux check out Slackware. I also recommend that veteran Linux users check out Slackware as well. Please head over to docs.slackware.com and read [The Slackware Way](http://docs.slackware.com/slackware:philosophy). You should also read [The Slackware Essentials](http://www.slackbook.org/) book if you are new to Slackware or to Linux. I also recommend joining irc.freenode.net and entering the #slackware channel. You will find helpful and friendly people that are as refreshing as the Slackware Linux distribution. With that said, I may have strayed a bit and become carried away with my praise of Slackware. In case my little rant appealed to you, below are additional resources for Slackware, as well as a screen shot of my current Slackware desktop running Xfce with composition enabled. (Click image to enlarge) {% include the-switch-to-slackware.markdown %} #### Article Resources * [Slackware Web Site](http://www.slackware.com/) * [Slackware Forums](http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/) * [The Slackware Documentation Project](http://docs.slackware.com/) * [Get Slack!](http://www.slackware.com/getslack/)