    "Even more common: “Oh, I’m not going to use Gentoo. I want to go all the way and use LFS!”

    They never heed my warnings about it. Every one of them either quits in the middle of the install, or soon after, and swears off source based distributions for life.

    Slackware and LFS are the Haskells of the Linux distribution world. People jump to the extreme end of the spectrum, and either get burnt or remain unproductive for life, when they should have just used OCaml or F# instead."

▲ shevy-java 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Slackware and LFS are the Haskells of the Linux distribution world.

Haskell is hard. Both Slackware and LFS are simple. I don't see the comparison.

LFS is even better in that it provides a ton of documentation. Slackware unfortunately lost out to the modern world. But heroic effort by Patrick.

▲

BeetleB 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Haskell is hard. Both Slackware and LFS are simple. I don't see the comparison.

LFS/BLFS is hard to maintain as a primary OS. Gentoo is practical and easy in comparison. How many people do you know stick to LFS?

The point isn't so much about hard/simple, but jumping to the extreme instead of the pragmatic approach.

▲

dokyun 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Slackware unfortunately lost out to the modern world. But heroic effort by Patrick.

I dunno man, a lot of people still use it! Been on it every day about 4 years now, there's a modern ARM port in development, so it might not end up going away for a long time.

That Slackware is difficult to use on the level of Gentoo or LFS I think is mostly a meme and an overstatement; it's just very old-school. It has a nice installer and a good wiki.

Many of the gripes that I hear of managing other linux systems I seldom or never have experienced on Slackware. It doesn't get in your way or flippantly change things from one release to the next. It's a rock-solid choice.

	▲	nineteen999 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The funny thing is that a lot of us older people started with Slackware back in the late 1990's, only because early Debian and Redhat builds on the Infomagic CD's were too broken to install or run reliably. Slackware 2.0 was pretty rock solid by comparison and installed out of the box on most PC hardware I could find at the time.

▲ agumonkey 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I got a partial burn, in that I realized how a working OS is an alignment of planets and if you fiddle with the physics wrong you get all kinds of magical phenomenon

My network stack was partially working depending on the program which initiated the TCP connection.. never again :)