@sullybiker jokes aside tho i’m glad to see folks newer to the game running the gamut. slackware is most like BSD IIRC, you can get some binary software, but generally are encouraged to compile everything from source. there is an understanding of the system and confidence in what you have that comes from that.

@sullybiker i think in honor of your post i’m going to spin up a slackware vm. :D

@justizin The only non-standard thing I really like is sbopkg, provides a curses interface to the slackbuild repo with queuing and just enough automation to really speed complex packages up.

@sullybiker sounds neat! i honestly have not touched it in over 20y i am eager to see what’s up.

@justizin I've found snaps and Flatpak have made me very lazy, so I try to avoid them now, as much as I can.

@sullybiker i’m fine with being lazy, i think when you want to get things done, its great to get things done. my team supports the base images for probably a couplefew hundred containers at work, some build environments, etc…

i’m probably better at supporting ubuntu and alpine bc of the time i have spent hand crafting bespoke OS installs.

@sullybiker Linux From Scratch was an *incredible* resource, I also havent touched that in decades, but it seems to still be chuggin along.

@sullybiker compiling your linker from source will really get the ol bones shakin ;)

@justizin KISS is cool too, I liked the clear-headed philosophy behind it.

@sullybiker just like, the unix philosophy KISS, or something specifically slackwarey?

@justizin Oh sorry, it's an actual project! https://kisslinux.org

@justizin I had a lot of fun with it, but lost a lot of time screwing about with the kernel config because Kiss encourages everything in kernel (no initramfs although it's optional) and it's a job to get the storage stack behaving

@sullybiker yah i remember those days on like my 486 and p166 being like, “oh it’s more efficient to build everything statically and have no modules” and now i think it would take a monumental effort to measure any difference.

@justizin I enjoyed things like busybox init and learning to get along with Sway which is pretty awesome once you figure it all out. I noted in the blog post though that even the creator of Kiss provides a flatpak build script which amused me no end, but he really dislikes dbus (so no bluetooth and some other limitations.) It's a nice exercise though.

@justizin I dread to think about a build now with a P166. It would be all night!

@sullybiker it was a much smaller kernel, but a couple hours was not uncommon IIRC.

@justizin I remember when Gentoo started providing binaries for things like Firefox and Chromium because people were just *over it*

@sullybiker yeah lol, “got a new water cooled rig to build firefox once a week” 🤣🤣

@sullybiker build time was ANOTHER reason to be super picky. i had a .config i carried around between machines that i spent many hours in menuconfig / test builds getting to a satisfactory place.

i was in menuconfig recently and i swear there are things that have been deprecated for over 25 years.

@justizin A few years back I used to use Slackware's config and suddenly the number of options after makeoldconfig (I think??) rocketed upwards so much I just chose the option to accept all defaults

@justizin It's been an inspiration in Slackware Multilib, that much I do know

@justizin It's a shame some shops don't encouraging packaging anymore, like Plex and occasionally the devs bundle a better package in their flatpack repos which isn't feature matched by the maintainers of distros.

@sullybiker most distros are maintained by volunteers except for internet servers and basic system utilities. as the developer of a package like plex, you can reach a much broader audience with something like flatpack or whatever.

personally, i’ve taken to building my own custom docker images for more and more of the software i use, i blow a bunch of my systems away frequently and i get nice isolation. if i want to use something that only works with a newer or older ubuntu, i can!

@justizin Not me! someone on Reddit wrote that bit!

@sullybiker ah okay anyway it amused the living shit out of me in the best possible way. :D