He replied to a post in the Slackware forum back at the end of January telling folk he had terminal cancer. No idea how things have progressed since then but I know he was already very unwell at that point and I've not seen him crop up since that time. I imagine he's either spending his remaining time with his family or he's already at rest. Either way, losing Steve is a huge blow to the community. Wish I could have met him and thanked him in person for his videos. They were so helpful to me in the early days of running Slackware.
afb
joined 1 year ago
Off the top of my head, it'd be Debian, Arch, Void, and Gentoo. There are others that are debatable.
The key is in the name. Whoever distributes the software to you determines whether it's commercial or community. Where they get it from is irrelevant because they're the ones distributing it to you.
Ubuntu can't be made closed-source because of the licensing of the software they use from upstream. Red Hat is still not closed source, for instance. Everyone who gets it gets access to the source code. But if Ubuntu went away or whatever then downstream distributions would be in a spot of trouble. They could rebase on Debian (which is what Ubuntu is based upon), but how hard that would be varies wildly depending on distro. Linux Mint already have a Debian edition, for instance. No problem there. Pop OS would certainly be able to make it work as well; they're a very professional operation. But take, for example, Endeavour OS. It's Arch with a graphical installer and some nice defaults. Without Arch Linux (which is almost certainly not going anywhere and is a community distro) they'd have some real problems. There's no upstream to Arch to rebase on. They'd have to so fundamentally change everything to accomodate a whole new base and packaging system that they'd basically be making a whole new distro.
The Slackware community has produced about 8 package manager front-ends that handle dependency resolution, so it's not an issue at all and hasn't been for over a decade. The big thing with Slackware is an emphasis on simplicity of design over ease of use and an expectation that the user will make all the decisions regarding how their system is maintained. I love it, use it on my main machine (Void on my laptop, Ubuntu on my server). It's taught me a lot about operating systems in general and Linux in particular, and it lets me do whatever I like. I use sbotools and flatpak for my 3rd party software, the former being a ports-like interface to slackbuilds.org (like the AUR for Slackware, but far smaller and with a lot more quality control). Works great, no surprises, boots fast, rock solid and dependable.
Nice! FreeBSD is cool. Couldn't make it work for me as a regular thing due to poor/outdated WiFi and bluetooth, but if it suits your use case then it's a really solid option.
Nice! FreeBSD is cool. Couldn't make it work for me as a regular thing due to poor/outdated WiFi and bluetooth, but if it suits your use case then it's a really solid option.
Agree entirely. I use newsboat (inside vterm (inside emacs)).
Specifically with KDE and Arch, if you installed the meta package including the sddm display manager, make sure you're using sddm-git and not the stable release (19.x I think) because the stable version of sddm doesn't support Wayland. That could be why you're seeing a black screen, the drivers shouldn't be that bad. KDE is in the process of transitioning to being Wayland by default, some things are still WIP and you may have to account for that on bleeding edge distros like Arch. That's the fun thing about Arch, not only does it not stop you from shooting yourself in the foot, it cheerfully loads the gun for you.
Slackware 15.0 on my desktop, Void on my laptop. I try other stuff on my laptop from time to time (FreeBSD has been my favourite experiment so far, but the wifi and bluetooth are just too bad for me to be able to use it regularly), but always go back to Void. I don't distro-hop on my main machine.
I'm actually looking for an open source project to get involved in. Started teaching myself Python and Javascript last year, picked up some C and Linux-adjacent skills at some point, now studying CS part time as a mature student. I'd love to get involved with something free and open and I'd be happy to learn a new language to do it. Anyone desperate? 😂
Perhaps fair, but since they're planning to move downstream of Serpent OS, they're not gonna be an independant distro for much longer and probably shouldn't count in the broader context of this thread.
I also didn't count a bunch of distros with atypical functionality (like NixOS, Alpine, Slackware, etc), just because they tend to have very particular usecases and maybe aren't well-suited as general recommendations if someone's looking for a typical Linux experience, but YMMV.