• John_CalebBradberton@lemmy.world
    0·
    10 days ago

    Do people really be using Slackware these days? I’m on Bazzite atm and it’s cool but a bit different esp with the ostree stuff.

    Curious what the use case is for Slackware nowadays

    • Samskara@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      10 days ago

      Feeling superior to Gentoo and Arch users.

      I see the main use case for Slackware, if you’re a Linux graybeard, who has used it for 20 years.

    • marcos@lemmy.world
      0·
      10 days ago

      Slack is great when you need to make something completely out of the ordinary. It’s right there just one step removed from a system from scratch without GNU.

      That said, embedded computers nowadays run full Debian. So I dunno what use it still has.

    • Pommes_für_dein_Balg@feddit.orgOP
      0·
      10 days ago

      A few thousand people in the world, yes.

      It combines the stability of Debian with the simplicity of Arch, and turns both up to 11.
      Main selling point is that it never does anything unexpected.
      You set it up and then it works the way you’re used to, literally for decades.

    • poke@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      10 days ago

      Yeah, that’s me comfortably sitting on Bazzite right now. There are definitely ways for it to improve, but I’ve only really ever had one issue in the last few months, and that was fixed the next week. I just get to use my computer, and it’s nice.

      • ilillilillilillililli@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        10 days ago

        Did you also have an issue booting due to some network driver issue on 43.20260309? I had to rpm-ostree rollback to 43.20260217 a couple weeks ago. Besides that, Bazzite has indeed been very smooth sailing.

        • poke@sh.itjust.works
          0·
          10 days ago

          Ah, thankfully I didn’t run into that one. I have a goxlr and they broke it for 2 weeks so I did a manual rollback until it was fixed, because having audio is kinda nice.

        • badgermurphy@lemmy.world
          0·
          10 days ago

          I am one of those people, but I’m still annoyed when my tools don’t work right. I hate having to fix something, only to find out that my tool I need for that also needs repairs. I use my computer’s primarily as tools, so I almost always am at least a little annoyed when my computer demands attention all of a sudden.

          Maybe there are others that are hobbyists. I guess if you’re a computer tinkerer primarily, troubleshooting that crap can be like cultivating a zen garden, but it is the opposite for me.

        • timestatic@feddit.org
          0·
          10 days ago

          Yeah but I like to tinker when I chose to tinker. Not randomly when I’m trying to get work done

  • Jiral@lemmy.org
    0·
    10 days ago

    Tumbleweed somehow gives me the newest Plasma with neither configuration nor manual dependency resolution exhaustion. It is not perfect either but it squares the circle of a stable rolling release distro surprisingly well.

  • FauxLiving@lemmy.world
    0·
    10 days ago

    Based on my years of community experience, whichever you pick is wrong and you’re a bad person for thinking that it was the right choice.

  • pH3ra@lemmy.ml
    0·
    10 days ago

    And in the center of the graph you can find Fedora.
    Far from perfect but the exact middle ground

    • Pommes_für_dein_Balg@feddit.orgOP
      0·
      10 days ago

      Bazzite. An immutable[1] distro pre-configured for gaming.

      [1]

      The root system is one image and can’t be altered.
      Software is installed from a GUI software center via flatpak.
      A bit like Android.

    • JGrffn@lemmy.world
      0·
      10 days ago

      Boring is good indeed. I’m running Bazzite on both my gaming desktop as well as my work laptop (webdev). The only reason I think about Bazzite at all is because I see it mentioned everywhere and feel the need to share my experience. Otherwise, it really is out of sight, out of mind.

      • horrorslice@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        10 days ago

        Yup. I agree. Immutable distros save me from myself and endless tweaking. I have it on my gaming laptop and my gaming desktop. I’ll be throwing it on my wife’s gaming desktop soon enough.

        • rumschlumpel@feddit.org
          0·
          10 days ago

          I don’t have any experience with immutable distros, are they harder/impossible to tweak, or just easier?

          • horrorslice@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            9 days ago

            The core files are read-only. You can layer new system applications, but it’s not as easy as just installing a package. Most things are handled via Flatpaks. So the base is solid and you can’t do much to really ruin the stability.

            There is a learning curve, as it’s different than normal distros.

            Here is a decent read up on it: https://www.linuxnest.com/what-is-an-immutable-distro

    • Pommes_für_dein_Balg@feddit.orgOP
      0·
      10 days ago

      Tried that, but my autism didn’t like it.
      The fact that YaST and the KDE settings had overlapping functionality, a GUI package manager frontend that shows you options you aren’t supposed to use in Tumbleweed, and it being the only modern distro that couldn’t install my printer-scanner-combo automatically drove me off.

      • insomniac_lemon@lemmy.cafeEnglish
        0·
        4 hours ago

        For me, I didn’t like patterns (or the work-arounds). A shame because it (or now, maybe slowroll) might be closer to what I’m looking for, especially if the talk of smoke-testing is true. (I’ve also seen someone say that Zypper is slow)

        I like some of what I’ve seen with NixOS, though I see quite a few things that make it seem like not the answer either. And some of the things (like distrobox) seem like they probably add weight to updating as well (and/or clunkiness, if I have to manually do it).

        Also some of my issue is I’m still running a 1050Ti (and Arch putting the legacy drivers on the AUR, a bit of a pain for me… not sure if that has changed though), I know that’d likely be even worse on Nix as well.

        Ideally I’d like something that has an update system intended for slower internet. Something that can pull (/keep) slightly older dependencies when user-land stuff is a bit slow, or outright delay/reschedule possibly-broken (for any number of reasons) updates rather than wasting a user’s time and bandwidth. Guessing it doesn’t exist, though (or if it does, it has some other huge workflow flaw).

        Mentioning @LostWanderer@fedia.io because they’ve talked about Tumbleweed and Nix.

          • somethingDotExe@lemmy.world
            0·
            10 days ago

            Ye, its another “software-center” now called myrlyn. I still use sudo zypper for everything and I like the sudo zypper dup for updating your machine and make sure everything on both drivers and software related is updated by the distro it self, so you don’t end up with mitchmatches here and there. Also the snap funktion for rollback by default is epic.

      • cally [he/they]@pawb.socialEnglish
        0·
        10 days ago

        It’s there to solve your “This is boring” issue without having to do all of the system configuration stuff manually*.

        I was able to package a nightly AppImage as if it were installed normally like an app, and I could reinstall the system if I wanted to, and it’d still be there. NixOS is the opposite of manual dependency resolution, it’s dependency heaven. You can have unstable and stable repositories side-by-side, living in a utopic egalitarian society. You can write a configuration file that does everything. You can do anything with NixOS. NixOS is the one true god, all hail NixOS—

        Ah, I see why you may not want to use it. Consider it though, it’s genuinely good and trying doesn’t hurt.

        I haven’t even told you about nix-comma or nix helper (nh) yet. May the, uh, flake be with you.

        *You do have to write the config files, though you can just adapt someone else’s configuration.

        • Cyberwolf@feddit.org
          0·
          10 days ago

          You can have unstable and stable repositories side-by-side, living in a utopic egalitarian society.

          The NixOS-communist intersectionality is something I never expected to come across, but it makes so much sense lmao. This is 100% true.

    • Bonje@lemmy.world
      0·
      10 days ago

      I adore the idea of nix. I fucking hate the syntax with a passion.

      oh use the .packages but only for this else use a flake and if you want dot files there is this other completely different thing with home manager but if you want this extra config customization or a custom system script then you need to make a derrivatio…

      its so damn exhausting.

      I just want a list of packages.

      That I can put in modules.

      And turn them on and off based on the computer I’m on.

      And if they are on they should use these dots.

      And not look like a spaghetti bowl made of curly braces sourced from json derulos left buttock.

      And the system should also have some additional sbctl hooks because we still have not figured out that dracut generated initramfs files don’t get purged from the database so I have to have a custom hook to not get error messages every time I paru ahahahAAHAHA…

      anyway dcli exists and is a fine middle ground.

      • thedeadwalking4242@lemmy.world
        0·
        10 days ago

        The biggest thing that helped me with nix is to realize the syntax is shit because the language is veryyyy different. Entirely expression based, nearly pure functional programing. Everything is a set.

        Once I understood that it was much simpler, and worth the time. I never worry about system configuration anymore it just works, and it’ll keep working unless I choose to change something in my system flake

  • Affine Connection@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    10 days ago

    For my bare metal personal systems, I just use Debian stable with backports. When that does not suffice, I manually build and install things from source.

    • Hellfire103@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      10 days ago

      Yeah, but in my experience it isn’t great. Salix is a lot nicer.

      Of course, your mileage may vary. There are definitely still a lot of true slackers out there!

    • rumschlumpel@feddit.org
      0·
      10 days ago

      Debian Testing kinda sucks, it’s like the worst of both worlds of Debian and Arch; updates for some packages can be held back for months because of some blocker, while stable at least gets fastracked to important fixes for security or system stability, and Sid just naturally gets them faster because it’s more up to date. Sid is probably better overall, but why use an unstable rolling release without all the convenience that Arch’s tools offer? AFAIK pacman is really nice for stuff like making your own packages. Plus it has a much larger user base than Debian Sid, which helps when you’re looking for a fix for recent issues.

      • jabjoe@feddit.ukEnglish
        0·
        10 days ago

        I’ve found Testing works rather well as a compromise. It’s actually very stable, while most of the time, constantly updating. It’s only during freeze time it stops noticeably changing. At unfreeze, there is a load at once, but it’s yet to be a real problem for me in like 15y. SID is a bit too bleeding edge for my liking. The Arch and SID guys can be on the front line, that’s fine. I thank them for their service, but I don’t want it quite as interesting as that.

        • rumschlumpel@feddit.org
          0·
          10 days ago

          Well, you do you. My Debian Testing install was my only bare metal install that ever broke because of an update (not to say that Arch etc. would have been any better, I just haven’t been using rolling release distros since then).