A whole year. I've been using Slackware for a whole year. Well, a little over a year actually. I've been using this distribution since November 2021, when I first put it on my laptop as an experiment. At the time, I wasn't at home a lot and mostly at my grandparents watching my Grandpa and Grandma (Rest her soul.) while my Aunt was out doing chores. Unfortunately, they had extremely slow internet, so if I needed to download new software like I do all the time, it would take a reaaaaally long time.

Birth of a Slacker

This is when I remembered how Slackware worked. Where it installs everything, and I do mean everything at install. I had always dismissed it from it's lack of dependency management, and being kind of "bloated". However, I decided to try it out, since I actually needed everything at once. What I ended up finding was a beautiful OS, that was extremely BSD-like in administration, but with all the power of a GNU/Linux system (Drivers, GNU Utilities, etc). At first, I thought there was no way it would replace my OpenSUSE Leap install on my actual workstation, and Slackware had been stuck on 14.2 since 2016! And then a few months later, 15.0 came out.

Installing it on my Main Machine

I started to worry about the OpenSUSE project around early 2022, it seemed we were never going to get another Leap release (And it later came out, that my hunch was indeed correct), and I needed to find a new stable distro. In the order I tried:

1st. Fedora:
This was the first one I tried. And it didn't go to well... I had many driver issues, such as my games constantly stuttering (And I don't even play AAA games! Just indie!), odd system crashes, and in general, everything was slow.
2nd. RHEL:
Well, maybe the reason I had issues on Fedora is because it's a bit bleeding edge. So I tried a RHEL derivative (AlmaLinux if anyone is curious), but that quickly ended when I realized I couldn't use BTRFS without installing a 3rd party kernel, or installing Oracle Linux. I absolutely rely on BTRFS for one reason: compression. The reason I haven't needed to upgrade my storage in a long time is because I save literal terabytes in data from compression. So this was a no-go... I would actually try it again a few months later (Documented that on Fosstodon), but it ended when I couldn't get intel GPU drivers working due to a bug in RHEL9... It's so sad seeing how far the RHEL desktop has fallen since RHEL 6/7.
3rd. Debian:
My next go to was Debian. But i'll be honest... I hate dpkg. I make a lot of custom packages for myself, as it's a way to easily manage /usr/local. But making a debian package is absolutely painful compared to making an RPM, or really ANY mainstream linux packaging system. Even making a FLATPAK is easier than dpkg. Suffice to say, I was always getting pretty irked by quirks in Debian, but it was stable enough, so I put up with it for a couple months.

I started hearing rumors that Slackware 15.0 was coming soon, at first I thought it was mostly just smoke... until it happened. I had at this point been running Slackware -current on my Laptop, and was surprised when I saw the announcement that 15.0 was officially released. I immediately installed it on my Workstation, and well, I've been on the same install since.

Da Future

I've been thinking about trying out Salix to get a little more minimalism on my system, as it's slackware with dependency management, but overall, i'm pretty content with what I have. Since I installed Slack on my workstation, i've actually since moved my Laptop's distro to Mageia, as typing on my laptop's keyboard sucks, and I wanted clicky buttons (Clicky buttons that salix provides), so I might try out Salix on my laptop soon.