[GTALUG] From Slackware to which distro?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Apr 27, 2022 at 12:37:21AM -0400, William Park via talk wrote:
> I've been running Slackware since forever.  It's time to grow up and see the
> world.  Which distro would you recommend that I move to?  Yes, I know it's
> personal, and reasons will be varied and educational.
> 
> - Ubuntu -- OK.  I use it at work in VM and in WSL (Windows Subsystem for
> Linux).  For me, Mint is another flavour, just like Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc.
> 
> - Oracle -- I use it at work too.  Was CentOS, but switched to Oracle
> because they said delivering end-of-life OS is bad marketing.
> 
> - Fedora -- OK.  Doesn't seem to have its equivalent in Ubuntu side.
> 
> - OpenSUSE -- Difficult to pin down.  It uses RPM but in their own way. It
> has rolling release (Tumbleweed) and versioned release (Leap).
> 
> - Arch -- no.  I don't need/want to learn what they are trying to teach.  I
> run Slackware, so I already know all that.

I ran SLS then slackware then moved to Redhat 2.0 (back when there was
such a thing) because it actually had package management, which clearly
showed slackware was useless (this would have been around 1995).  I then
stuck with that until Redhat 6.0 which was so buggy things like bind
regularly crashed, and even reporting bugs to redhat seemed to serve
no purpose (I even knew some people working at redhat at the time,
and they couldn't even get it to the right people).  At that point I
moved to Debian 2.1 (around 1999).  I have stuck with it since because
it works and I haven't seen any new distribution offer anything better
(Ubuntu is Debian done wrong (fixed release dates equal broken software),
a few other new ones believe in the build everything from source yourself
which is just a stupid waste of compute resources).  At work we use
opensuse (which has certainly shown me why that isn't anymore popular
than it is and why the rpm package format is very much inferior to the
deb package format), and I work with yocto also using rpm packages (in
theory it also could use deb but that isn't the default and hence often
broken in some packages) so I know what a pain making rpm packages is
compared to making deb packages (debhelper tools are wonderful).

So if you want something flexible that works, use Debian, and if you
want a more polished desktop environment out of the box, use Mint
debian edition.

-- 
Len Sorensen