More on Slackware

Like I had mentioned in my last post, here’s the second article which continues with my thoughts on Slackware. We’ll start with the package management first. Just as RedHat/Fedora packages come as RPM files, and Debian based packages have a .deb extension, Slackware packages come as .tgz files. Slackware provides utilities like installpkg, removepkg, upgradepkg (called pkgtools) to manage packages. But dependency resoution is manual, which can be a big pain sometimes, especially if a package you so urgently need depends on dozens of other packages. That’s why most major distros have tools for automatic dependency resolution. For example, Fedora has yum and Debian based distros come with apt-get. Thankfully, a tool similar to apt-get has also been written for Slackware. It’s called slapt-get.

Slapt-get is very similar to apt-get in how it works. If there is a package you need, you can do a slapt-get –install <something> and the slapt-get utility searches for the appropriate packages in its repository and downloads it for you. If that <something> depends on <something-else> then that <something-else> is also downloaded and both are installed for you. It’s simple enough to use and it has options to remove and upgrade packages like apt-get does.

Now, Ubuntu users, having used the point-and-click Synaptic package manager will probably wonder why anyone would use a command line tool for package management. It is true that some people will not like to use command line utilities and so using slapt-get might seem like an impossible task. Thankfully, there is a GUI tool for package management in Slackware as well.  It’s called GSlapt and it provides a nice front-end to the slapt-get tools.

Finally, Slackware ships with KDE and while KDE has its share of fans, I personally prefer GNOME. I just think it has a more user-friendly interface. There are some GNOME packages for Slackware available, which means you can install GNOME, even though the distro doesn’t ship it. I decided to try out GNOME SlackBuild. The install instructions are fairly simple and you’ll need slapt-get to install it. I followed the instructions and downloaded and installed GNOME SlackBuild on my system. Everything seems to work fine, although on my machine, GNOME is definitely not as fast as KDE, and in fact I noticed a delay of almost half a second in loading the menu-icons, which I found a major irritant. Whether the problem is with GNOME SlackBuild, or with GNOME itself or if my hardware is too old for 2.22, I don’t know. There are also other Slackware packages for GNOME like Dropline, but I haven’t tried them.

Some final thoughts: While Slackware is a pretty good distro, it scores very poorly on the GUI front. When you are using KDE, for instance, you are very aware that it is just an application running on top of the kernel, and the tight integration of the GUI with the rest of the OS like in Ubuntu, is just not there in Slackware. I know it is a conscious decision to keep things simple, but for desktop usage, you would want a much more functional GUI. The other thing is that after I installed Slackware, I realised that I prefer GNOME over KDE and Slackware doesn’t ship it. Installing GNOME-for-Slackware builds just isn’t the same as GNOME being shipped with the distro. Your menus become messy and you end up getting software which you don’t really need, and in the end, you have yet another desktop package that feels like it was put there as an afterthought, not something that came with the OS.

So in the end, I still maintain that installing Slackware was worthwhile thing, simply because I learnt many new things, and even though I might go ahead and install Ubuntu on my machine, any new command or script knowledge will certainly come in handy in future.