Slackware Turns 30: Oldest Surviving Linux Distro!!

Recently Slackware the oldest surviving Linux distro turned 30 years old so I thought what better time to look back and the origin of this legendary distro and see how we got here.

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#Slackware #Debian #Linux #OpenSource #FOSS

🎵 Ending music
Track: Debris & Jonth - Game Time [NCS Release]
Music provided by NoCopyrightSounds.

DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase I may receive a small commission or other compensation.

[anon_y_mousse]

As a longtime Slackware user, I really appreciate when people cover it. And I also hope that Patrick lasts another 30 years, BDFL.

[cameronbosch]

Fun Fact: Debian "1.0" was accidently put on a Linux compilation CD, which was actually a beta, so the first "stable" version was 1.1 "Buzz", skipping 1.0 because of it.

[xade]

Thanks for the Bedtime story, your grand children will be lucky.

[yukoff]

I started my linux journey with Slackware. There was/is a saying like “if youʼll learn Red Hat — youʼll know RH, if youʼll learn Slackware — youʼll know Linux”

[arielalejandro]

I'm work as a sysadmin on my office and we're migrating windows based computer to linux, I use slackware as training platform for my students because I can make that show each component of a linux distro from its early beginning in the 90s and how we come up to what we are today, hundred of distros, desktops, window managers, runlevels, package managers, that might be overwhelming for newcomers. Slackware is really gem of living history to make them comprehend how and why gnu/linux is what it is today.

[chuckmuckamuck]

Slackware was my first distro in the fall of 1993. I've moved on to Arch and Ubuntu but I am always keen to hear the story of Slackware again.

[thingsiplay]

Brodie "Historian" Robertson
Super interesting history coverage! BTW the "Historian" in quotes is very important here, at least in context to this video. ;-)

[antonyfox-bramwell]

I use Slackware as my main distro. I love it. I use Void on another machine, and I could happily use that full-time as well, but there's just something magical about doing a full Slackware install and finding all this classic software there to explore. Sometimes I'll just boot into Fvwm and play Nethack for a bit, see how the previous generation experienced computing. It runs modern applications perfectly as well, so I certainly don't feel like I miss anything from not using Arch or Fedora. Can't see myself switching to anything else any time soon.

[northof-]

Good times!
Congratulations Patrick!
I still have my Slackware CD-roms and books ("Linux Configuration & Installation" and "slackware linux ESSENTIALS")
My first distro, though, was Caldera's "Open Linux Base" with Visix' "Looking Glass Desktop", which in turn I also installed on
Slackware .
By 1995 many distroes were well established. PC magazines started to include them on their shareware CD-roms.
And Linux Journal started to appear at the newsagents. (RIP)

[TroubledTrooper]

One of my favorite things about Slackware as an observer is the logo. While openSUSE is talking about changing theirs and "modernizing", Slackware still sports that "early to mid 90s cool" logo and have shown no signs of changing it. I need to get around to daily driving Slackware one of these days for a challenge, as a younger Linux user I feel like I gotta try it at least.

[Kneedragon]

Early Feb '95 I started studying computers at a TAFE (college) level. In the 1st month, I was introduced to a version of UNIX owned by Micro$oft, and Win-95, and NT-4. In late Feb or early March I saw a couple of things done in a network lab that I thought were impossible, and I asked if that was UNIX. I got told no, come to me later, this is called Linux and it's sort-of like UNIX. At the end of the class I got a 5 minute introduction to the Unix that wasn't Unix and GNUs, and to Slackware. It was headless, TTY only, and it could do things I had no idea were possible. Maybe a month later, I saw a copy of Redhat that had an x-org and a desktop called gnome2 ~ which looked like Windows done by boy-scouts.
Today, I use Mint + Mate as my main daily driver, and I've come to love that gnome2 desktop enormously.

[wantgoodvibes]

Thank you so much for this coverage!! Really it's such a blast from the past for me and other folks too who were around the scene as grateful enthusiasts and users at the time . I installed and used Slackware several times as time went by, mainly because it was around so early in the 90's Linux/Unix(BSD) blast off, :), It makes me want to spin up a VM right now and just tinker some!!

[amonaxos]

I m a happy Slackware user. Thanks for your video!

[morgannelson]

I cut my teeth on linux with Slackware some time in late '95. I had to download something like 50+ floppy disks over a buggy 33.6k modem to get the base system, networking and X installed. Good times. Glad to see it is still going!

[tkenben]

While in college, the first time I tried linux was installing slack from 19 floppies (I omitted some even though the standard mantra today is to not do that). Yeah, it took forever, but it worked on this kludge of a PC I built from spare parts from work. Even the graphics worked. This is more than can be said for my later attempt to get Red Hat I purchased to work on the same system 2 years later, which gave me days of headache. I think this might be the reason why -- to this day -- I have a lingering subconscious dislike for Red Hat and corporate linux in general.

[methanbreather]

In the early 2000s there was a swiss slackware user group that created for then current cpus optimized packages.

Those things sped up the system mightily. It was the difference between 'video is stuttering sometimes' and 'video is never stuttering'.

[eriksiers]

I've been using Slackware for almost 20 years. It's the only distribution I've ever really used on a regular basis, and it's the only one that's ever lasted more than a couple weeks on any of my machines.

[katrinabryce]

Walnut Creek is now xiSystems who are best known as the distributor of TrueNAS, a FreeBSD variant.

[sickpup]

I'm Slackware user. Its been very kind to me, once you know your way a little then it'll run for you like a charm.

[toranshaw]

It's a shame that Old Tech Bloke is no longer doing videos, as he's a Slackware user, so it would have been interesting to hear his thoughts on this!