Today I ditched Slackware completely. It used to be my number one, most used operating system. Until I found one that was better.
It all started when I got my Asus eee 1000HA. I installed a half-dozen different OS’s on it trying to find one that worked well with the weird hardware, and one that I liked. I just couldn’t find it. I tried Ubuntu with Adam’s kernel, gentoo, FreeBSD, Slackware, and Debian. Either it didn’t work with enough of the hardware or I just plain didn’t like it. Until I found Arch, which was about the same time that my mind was blown.
I never knew an OS could be so simple, yet extremely personal. There is now not a single program on my eee that I don’t want there. Not a single library. Not a single web browser. Everything that was installed was because I requested it to be installed. And it’s EASY! No, not to a n00b, but if you have decent linux experience, it is easy.
And the package manager! I really don’t like apt-get very much. I don’t mind sbopkg in Slackware, but it doesn’t find dependencies. But pacman (Arch’s pm) is simply amazing. It has support for rolling updates so you never need to worry about installing another release again.
“What’s that? KDE 4.2 was announced today? Let me install it, and while I’m at it I’ll just do a system update too.”
Types in terminal: # pacman -Syu
That’s it! I now have the latest kernel, KDE, and any other package on my system!
Give it a go if you don’t believe me.
Update: Arch just added kernel 2.6.28 to it’s core, meaning you can upgrade to this version with “pacman -Syu”. This also means you are eligible for the new filesystem, ext4.
