I first installed Linux from floppy disks back in 1996 on an old computer I had laying around. A friend of mine whom I knew through a local BBS had told me about this thing “Linux”, it was like Unix but for cheap Intel computers. I was amazed and after some tinkering I was also completely hooked. From that point I have always had at least one Linux machine running in my home. I got my mother to buy our first Internet connection with the promise that everyone in the house could use it, all thanks to Linux and this new thing called IP Masquerading.
That first Linux distribution was Slackware, a distribution by Patrick J. Volkerding which has always focused on simplicity, stability and having a sane collection of packages and defaults right out of the box. It is kind of like the OpenBSD of Linux if I was to try to make a really unnecessary analogy. Over the years my home server has always been Slackware, it was what I was the most comfortable with and it has never let me down. I even ran Slackware on my workstations up until a few years ago when World of Warcraft came around and I needed something a little more bleeding edge to get an X server with all the fancy direct rendering and 3d acceleration bits to make wine happy. I have trusted literally TeraBytes of data to Slackware and have not once been let down.
Over the last few days I have been struggling with a number of problems with my Sirius transcoder scripts. Between Sipie being unloved and requiring some work, and vlc being a royal pain sometimes I decided to upgrade my home server to Slackware 13.0. I have to start by saying i’m impressed with Slackware and the progress it has made over the years, a very small team (usually of one) has been able to make a stable, secure, reliable distribution for a very long time and the new version is no exception. And Slackware 13.0 is no exception to this rule, now bringing in amd64 support into the core distribution.
After a good 2 days of fighting the realization came that I just had to embrace, I have changed. The sad truth is that as with hardware I have come to expect software to Just Work(tm) and leave me out of it. I spend 60 hours a week wrestling with hardware and software in my job as a Systems Administrator for an ISP and I just don’t enjoy fighting it when I get home like I used to. My server acts as a media server for my PS3 so I can enjoy media content on my TV, a VOIP server for my home (I do not have a land line any longer) and hosts a number of status monitoring applications and stream recorders that I turn into podcasts for my private consumption. I need it all to just quietly work and cause me as little grief as possible.
So sadly it became time for me to go from loyal Slackware user for over a decade to full-on Ubuntu convert. We use Debian (and now Ubuntu) at work and I have been using Ubuntu in varying places since a friend of mine gave me a link in a chat pointing to what he promised was going to be a new Linux distribution that would change how people looked a Linux. It just made sense to convert, it meant I didn’t have to maintain 2 local mirrors anymore for security updates, I am much more comfortable with apt(8) and dpkg(8) and utilities like slapt-get(8) and swaret(8) are just kind of (very good) 3rd party hacks on top of the Slackware package management system.
It is amazing to see how far this dream has come, more and more I find myself quietly relying on various Free Software products to make my life simpler, easier and better and Slackware and Ubuntu have both been huge parts of that software stack. Thanks Pat, for 13 years of reliability, stability, security and sanity. Thanks also to Mark and Matt and the entire Ubuntu/Canonical gang for literally changing how thousands of people think of Linux. I converted my Mother a few weeks ago and have had less calls about the computer than I ever did with Windows.
Tags: linux, slackware, software, technology, ubuntu