Anyone old enough to remember using v1.0?
Off-topic, your hair looks like it’s charged by your touching the coffee cup.
Need the coffee to figure out my dependency tree after decades of manually installing things… ☕ (I kid, of course. That’s what the meth is for…)
I never want to touch a Slackware box, but I respect the hell out of it, and I’m glad it exists
deleted by creator
I too started with Slackware 3. Downloaded a billion disks from a BBS over a 14.4 modem. It was definitely an improvement over my previous experience of accidentally downloading Minix in Portuguese. That is a hard way to learn an OS or a language, let alone both simultaneously.
Minix! I actually went so far as to track down a copy of minix on Usenet and bought it, complete with floppy disks. But before I got around to installing it Linux became available, and I never got around to it. Can’t even imagine trying to install it in a foreign language. (It would be foreign for me anyway)
3.something in the late 90’s for me. I remember thinking their version jump from 4.0 to 7.0 was the stupidest thing ever.
Slackware was my first distro I ever properly used.
That 4-7 thing was really kind of funny at the time. There were so many version number purists then … major.minor.patch is the rule, and don’t you dare do anything but! Slackware is sitting there looking at Redhat and Mandrake and going: “what if we release version 7 – maybe we can trick people into switching!” or something.
Well, the t-shirt above is also from an arbitrary version number. Slackware released 13.0, 13.1, 13.2, 13.37 cause it was funny.
Now with git and rolling releases, I think people would be less mad. Hell, even windows 7->8->10 happened.
This is a very fun chart: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Distribution_Timeline.svg – slackware looks very impressive there – the longest lived old distro – and even Suse can (partially) trace its heritage to slackware. But, excluding Suse (and its derivatives), Slackware probably has less than 1% of the linux market share.
Actually, that chart probably explains the current redhat saga – look how many derivatives have spawned over the years! Imagine you could halt that process…
My first distro was a slackwear 1.x boot root floppy pair. To play around with on our brand new 60* megahertz Pentium system we got Christmas 93.
Yeah I installed 1.0 from floppy disks. I was really glad to get it on CD-ROM a bit later. I probably still have those floppies around here somewhere… I wonder if they still boot? Still have my old 486 around here somewhere too, come to think of it, but I needed a custom kernel to support my SCSI card and I’m definitely not going through that pain again. (Yes I had to boot off floppy drives in order to build a kernel image to be able to install it on my hard drive.)
Probably time to get rid of it.
Now post one without the shirt to be distro-agnostic.
To celebrate Slackware turning 30, I took off my shirt. My girlfriend and six people on the internet were super impressed by my slackware tattoo.
sigh yes I remember 1.0 taking up a lot of my 160mb hard disk.
Things I remember: changing the command line font was mindblowing. I managed to get xeyes to run, but not a window manager, so I just had massive eyes following the cursor around. I compiled a lot of my really shoddy C code but had no idea what I was doing. The number of disks that Emacs needed felt disproportionate at 5 when MS Word 2.0 fitted on 3, and Doom fitted on 3 and a half.
It was all very exciting, and felt like you were “sticking it to the man” by not using ms-dos :-)
These days I just use computers as a tool, and as such I have Linux Mint on my home machine.
