Created in 1993 by Patrick Volkerding, Slackware is considered the oldest Linux distribution actively developed, its focus is simplicity and stability, its main objective is to stay true to the UNIX standard.
For those who haven’t noticed yet, I use the Slackware distribution, and people often ask me “Why do you use Slackware?”. Many of them say that it is too complicated, and that I should use another distro.
Slackware works great and that’s already a good reason to use it, however, there are many advantages to using a distribution where one of the main focuses is simplicity. Here are some of them:
Simplicity
Being simple doesn’t mean it’s easy, in fact Slackware is far from being suitable for beginners, but over time the user gets the hang of it. Slackware has an extremely simple package manager, however, it does not resolve dependencies, it is all written in shell script, its simplicity makes it very easy to edit. Changing settings in Slackware, things like changing the keyboard layout, consisting of editing some configuration file, uncommenting some line or changing some value, it is a manual process, but simple.
Learning
The system avoids many automatisms and is very manual, which, on the one hand, gives the user more work, on the other hand, leaves him in control of the system, since with few automatic things running, the user is forced to automate more tasks if he needs it and, in this process, he ends up learning more about Linux, mastering more deeply how it works.
Community
Your community is not the biggest, we know that big communities have their advantages, however, the advantage of being smaller is that the community is very engaged and loyal to the distro, and these people end up having a lot of knowledge in Linux, because they stop using Slackware without learn Linux, as I said before, the system forces you to learn. So slackers end up being very present on Linux help forums which makes the community very active.
Stability
Because the system is simple, consequently, it ends up being lighter, leaner and less susceptible to errors.
I speak from experience that it is very difficult to crack Slackware unless you really want to. Just because it doesn’t have an automatic package manager, the probabilities of breaking due to some badly installed or broken package.
Slackware follows the KISS philosophy, which says keep things as simple as possible, don’t make things unnecessarily complicated, don’t change anything that already works unless you really need to.
Conclusion
Simplicity, that sums up Slackware. If that’s what matters to you then Slackware is for you, and you can find out why so many users love this distribution.
Of course, there are other advantages, but here I mention the ones I think are most important to me.
