The New Girl

Hi!

I'm not brand new to Linux, but new to Slackware, thanks to the awesome devs at SalixOS. I started with Ubuntu (9.04), and experimented with Linux Mint, Debian, PCLinuxOS, then Xubuntu where I stayed comfortably from 10.04 to 12.04. But Xubu started scaring me with really big, really major updates. I cringed at every one of them, because updates break the 'buntus with startling frequency. I had read somewhere that updates never break Slackware; that Slack is the oldest surviving Linux distro with incredibly long-term support, and that Slackware had been made as easy as Ubuntu by the SalixOS team, so I tried it out with fear and trepidation, since all I really knew was the Debian-based stuff.

Oh. My. Goshhhhhh! What wonderful speed! What simplicity and elegance! What stability and reliability! SalixOS has turned me into a raving fangirl.

I really like the Xfce desktop alot! It's simple, fast, and pretty. And parent-friendly too! I have alot to learn yet, but baby steps, like everything else.

I live on a farm, I love horses, gymnastics, dance, cheer, Diaspora, and saving the planet in little small ways like recycling this computer from the landfill and fixing up broken things like bicycles and such to give to charity. If I get grumpy it's because I just got new braces and they hurt sometimes. But I promise I won't post grumpy stuff!

Happy to be here,
Artim

Welcome aboard!

Welcome, Artim! I both started GNU/Linux with Jaunty and used Salix as a first Slack-based distro, too. Now using Vector7-Light because I like performance and LXDE. Have you tried antiX?

Good to hear from another ruralite. Keep comin' back!

Hello Pane-free! Actually my very first Slackware-based distro was Slax! Never intended to be installed to a hard drive, I found a way to do it anyway. Installed Slax was pretty limited, but it was plenty fast despite the KDE desktop.

AntiX wouldn't install properly but I wasn't really looking for a new distro at the time anyway. In fact I was trying to look beyond the Debian-based stuff and see what else was out there. My first look at LXDE was in a predecessor to Lubuntu called U-Lite (shorthand for "Ubuntu Lite" I think), but it was buggy and hard to configure. I think it was already being absorbed into the Lubuntu project when I found it. I really liked the file manager (pcmanfm) and have used it even in my Xfce distros since discovering it.

And I love the rural life. While other kids hang out at the mall and try to impress each other with fashion and video game prowess and having all the latest fancy shoes and accessories, I'm riding horses, tending to crops and critters, shooting skeet, riding the tractor, fishing, and tubing on the river (for about 30 minutes before I start getting sunburned even with SPF 50 on).

I understand Vector is Slackware-based but may not be "fully" compatible with it's parent distro. Is that right? Do you have access to the Slackware repositories and all that other goodness?

Thanking you for the welcome,
Artim

You're welcome!

See VL forum for an answer to the question about compatibility with Slackware repos.
I use SPF-8 and just get tanned after all day in the sun (lol).
I love the mountains. Specifically, the Cascades and the Blue Mountains of Oregon. See photo of this past March 31, Cle Elum, on the upper Yakama River.
View attachment 246
Functionality and performance are of a higher priority to me than configurability in a DE or WM.
I agree with your take on PCManFM -- it's my preference in file managers.
Enjoy the Freedom!

You can find Slackware, current, stable and previous releases at:
ftp.osuosl.org look at the /pub directory.

Once there, you can get the Current (to be released) version, or the latest stable or previous releases of Slackware.

They also host many other distributions. It is like a candy store for penguins.

Thanks everyone!

I have two identical ten-year-old computers that run nice and fast on Linux. One is a hand-me-down from parents, the other rescued from the landfill. One runs SalixOS and the other runs Xubuntu. There's not much difference in speed between the two, except the Xubuntu box boots a whole lot faster than the Salix box (may be a Lilo-vs-Grub2 thing). Xubuntu enjoys huge, vast, megarich repositories of every kind of software a girl could want, and Salix offers a really small library and a compiler that works about half the time because of dependency issues. Yet it's all I really need. I still have everything a girl could want on both.

Thanks for the warm welcome!

Artim