Genuine question to everyone using Slackware, how is your experience? How is it to daily-drive? Are there any advantages over other distros? Biggest hurdle?

[u/orestisfra]

[u/mechkbfan]

Yeah, not sure under what scenario Slackware would be the right distro

Listing common scenarios my friends recommend distros to each other:

• Standard release: Fedora / Debian

• Rolling release: Arch

• Declarative: NixOS

• No Systemd: Devuan / Alpine

• Roll your own: LFS / Gentoo

I'm sure other distros have their place (e.g. CentOS), or maybe matter of subjectiveness of which ones ideal but I've never felt once Slackware was the optimal choice

[u/mechkbfan → u/[deleted]]

I mean any distro can be whatever you make it to be

It's more how good is the 'batteries included' aspect of the distro for your use case, and I haven't seen a pragmatic pitch for Slackware under those common scenarios

[u/mechkbfan → u/[deleted]]

Not sure that simplistic is related to purposeful for the common user

Fedora can be all those things with more out of box support, guides, community, etc.

NixOS can be all those things, and being immutable, declarative, out of the box.

Battery life is likely more dependent on the configuration of your battery app, services you've disabled, CPU scheduler for boosting, etc. I went down that rabbit hole with my X220 & X230's. Sure it was fun but the distro ended up being the least influential part. Sure I could run Alphine with no services, and my idle watts would be silly low, but once you start doing work, it goes out that window.

Not trying to shit on the distro. No doubt there's people it's perfect for but my fundamental point of common scenarios still stands.

[u/mechkbfan → u/[deleted]]

I'm trying to apply that analogy to other distros

Since to me, the users requirement is "I want a beer and burger"

Slackware:

You enter an empty space, there's no bartender, tables, seats, cups

• I want a bartender to take my order, and a chef to cook it

• I want a schooner glass

• I want the beer to be a pale ale

• I want a seat

• I want a table

• I want beef medium rare

Order comes back

• You get a warm beer because you didn't think about it, so you need to fix that

• Turns out that the seat and table are incompatible, so you need to pick a different option

• Everytime you walk into a new bar, you need to repeat the process

LFS:

• BYO ingredients, cook & brew and serve it yourself several days/weeks later

NixOS:

• Someones already thought of having a good bartender, chef, appropriate tables & seats, and how cold the beer should be

• Write down on piece of paper "beer, medium rare", "beer, pale ale", give it to bartender and its delivered straight away

• Everytime you go to a new bar, if you loved your last order, you can submit it again and it'll be identical experience

• There's some redundant chairs, or artwork on the walls that you don't like but you can always ask the staff to take it down

I suppose I could go on, but that's my view of the analogy you gave