My first Linux was in 1998 (when I was in 9th grade) and I think my first distro was RedHat, but then my boyfriend at the time told me Slackware was better so I quickly switched. Like others in this thread, I learned so much from Slackware.

I eventually moved to Debian and its derivatives and now I only use Linux in a docker container or in a VM, but I’ll always look back on that time in my life fondly b/c it’s what shaped the basis for so much of my computing life. My career as an adult has had lots of pivots, but I can confidently say that I wouldn’t have my current day job if it weren’t for all the stuff being a Slackware user taught me 20 years ago.

Happy 25th, Slackware!

Slackware was my first introduction to Linux. I initially investigated it as a way to get around my parents setting a password on Windows. Thanks, mom and dad, for the (very unintentional) motivation that set me on the career path I'm on now.

Happy Anniversary! Like others here, Slackware was my first distro. I called it out in a blog post of mine a long time ago:

"All the “legit” people were using Linux so I spent a week downloading the different packages for a Slackware install and put them all on 3.5” floppies only to have the install fail. I should mention that up until this point I had basically zero Linux experience. Luckily for me there was Cheap Bytes which was a site that would burn everything to a CD and mail it to you for a small fee. A few weeks later that old 133Mhz Windows 95 computer was a lean and mean Linux box. I can still remember the panic when I saw that “darkstar login” prompt come up. What the hell had I done? As I said earlier, I was all in."

Oh, the memories. Like many others in this thread, Slackware was my first. I still smile thinking about the bootstrapping process I managed to figure out (I was ~12 years old at the time). We didn't have much money, which meant we didn't have a whole bunch of floppy disks laying around. I managed to scrounge up enough of them to get the A series and a subset of the N series (just enough for PPP and FTP). Once I got a working setup, I dialed into our ISP and slowly downloaded extras until I had a usable system. First X, and then a graphical browser, and then the rest. Fond fond memories.

Indeed happy anniversary, congrats, and thanks to Patrick Volkerding and crew.

I'm leaning towards FreeBSD lately, and when it's Linux at work it's necessarily RHEL due to company standardization etc, but Slackware is where the heart is, and will always be.

Pretty sure Slackware was the first or second Linux distribution that I tried while I was still in High School in the States. I was attracted to it because it was simple and straightforward, with the packages consisting of tarballs and the distributed packages being very close to vanilla with a minimum of distro patching or customization. It was easier to build stuff on. Didn't hurt that it was relatively svelte, either. I had a terrible connection (33.6 kbps).

My thanks for all their efforts. I learned a lot about Linux from playing around (poorly) with the distro. We've come a long way since then (the 90's). Happy Anniversary!

My 1st linux distro back on 1998 (when I was 16) was Slackware 3.6 with a Linux 2.0.36 kernel. I remember I had a 33.6 kbps modem and downloaded it floppy by floppy. The distro was seperated in letter named packages and you could download only what you needed (iirc it was 'a' for the core system, 'd' for development gcc et al, 'x' for x windows etc).

Slackware had a very nice and straight forward installation procedure considering I was 16 at that time and all comcepts were self learned.

The 'package' manager was as simple as possible: packages were tgz files that were just unzipped to /.

The real problems I had was with my (ISA) sound card and my modem: I rember that I had to boot windows first for the sound card to set up and get the proper IRQ/DMA and them hot reboot to linux. For the modem because of how the telecom provided in Greece worked (no dialtone) I had to configure it to use ATX3DT instead of ATDT to call a number.

All these took me weeks of research but were resolved to great excitement!

Finally, after a couple of months using linux and accessing various IRC channels through the cool BitchX client I executed an innocent looking binary I was sent over. I was running everything as root of course...

You probably can understand what happend then :/

Although I knew (some) of the risks of executing binary acquired binaries in Windows I thought that with linux I was invincible. The good thing was that I noticed strange commands in the root's history (the attacker wasnt that good after all) and I immediately formatted the drive.

That incident kept me away from linux for a couple of years until I felt more confident for my security skills!

When I downloaded it, painfully over a 57.6k modem using zmodem, I remember all the notes about slack and the church of Bob. At the time, 1993 or so, there was no Wikipedia, so it was a bit hard for a naive high school kid to figure out that there was actually no religious connotation. I never did get the hang of slack or slackware, but it got me on the path to where I am.

My earliest memory of Linux is a bunch of dark blue 3.5 inch disks that I used to install Slackware from. I think that GCC required additional 4 disks and X 6 of them? Good times.

Congratulations to Patrick and all the package maintainers and contributors! I've been a happy Slackware user for like 18 years or so, and eagerly awaiting Slackware 15!

Slackware: Linux at its finest: no cruft, easy to install, just works. No automatic dependency resolution is a blessing in disguise.

So many fond memories! Unlike many here, Slackware was not my first distro. I had tried Mandrake first, then RedHat, then grew more and more uncomfortable with their packaging system, and after a brief stint with Gentoo (admittedly, it was too early for my skills, back then) I met Slackware. It was love at first sight.

It was lean, nimble, skeletal almost. No frills, just perfect. My Athlon just flew with it - something I would never experience with Mandrake or RedHat! The (lovely) price to pay was that you would have to learn more about the internals. I would pay that price time and again!

And though I eventually moved to Debian (because, again, of the packaging system) I very fondly admit Slackware was my first true love.

Thanks for all you taught me, Slackware.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17598685

and

https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/donati...

If anyone is still monitoring this thread, it transpires that Patrick Volkerding, the BDFL and main developer of Slackware, is having financial problems.

Moderators: I think this story would be of interest to HNers because of its similarities with the OpenBSD situation some years ago, and the issue of how to fund open source/free software projects generally

Wow, time flies doesn't it? That was my first intro to Linux - installing on a 386 I think. Compiling stuff to get the sound card and CDROM working. Lots and LOTS of learning.

And finally, when it all worked - playing DOOM which actually performed better than on Windows.

Great (and not so great) memories of downloading floppy images from A-Z? Writing them to disk, trying to get X to work, then installing openlook and later CDE to pretend I had a Sun at my desk. May have been '94 or so. :-D

TIL that Slackware is about five months older than me. I was a distro geek in my teens, and Slackware, together with Gentoo, is on of the two distros that I never got working. Is there any concrete advantages to using it today?

In college, I was the SA of a small dialup ISP. Two PCs running Slackware, a Livingston port-master, a T1, and about two dozen Hayes modems. I probably still have the install CD in a box somewhere.

Yup, first taste of Linux was Slackware too. We ran it on a 486 which was our University webserver for us and our friends. I still wonder what happened to that box.

Been using Slackware for over 22 years, and don't have plans to stop using it any time soon...

I did throw out the last of my floppies many years ago, though!

Happy Anniversary.

I've moved on to MacOS for work and Arch Linux for home but Slackware will always have a special place as my intro to Linux and understanding what actually goes on beneath the surface on a computer.

I can't count the number of late-night hours I spent in high school learning about Linux and playing DroidBattles on a second-hand, beat-up Toshiba Portégé running Slackware.

Kudos.

Slackware was my first linux. I still vividly remember walking back and forth from the computer lab of sun machines, clutching my 3.5" floppies, hoping I had written out the data without any "block errors". At the time, I had no clue how I could check before hand without going through the install. it took more trips than i care to admit. :D

I use gentoo these days, but I used slackware as one of my first distros and I learned tons. Congrats on such a great distro!

Fall of 1996. guy on my freshman hall says "you should try linux". Installed slackware on everything I had for the next three years until finally switching to Debian.

Fondest slackware memory is installing the media to a Syquest Ezflyer -- but I needed to boot with a bleeding edge linux 2.2 kernel to recognize the parallel port hard drive!

Back in 2007 Slackware was my first Linux distro because that's what my friend at the time used. Later on it became Debian and then Ubuntu.

I think openSUSE was once upon a time based off of Slackware, it's since diverged greatly. openSUSE is one of my favorite modern distros outside of the Debian based ones.

As a SLS user, Slackware's arrival was very welcome. After every install of SLS a user might spend days applying patches to the system to get almost anything to work right. Slackware worked almost out of the box, which was HUGE back then.

Joining others into wishing a the happiest birthday to slackware. Never used it though :)

Slackware was my first distro back in the early to mid 90s. Switched t it from SLS! Both were downloaded from a local BBS...

Used it until Stampede Linux came out. (Them Pentium optimizations were important!)

I once was a Windows only guy. Then i was given Slackware from a friend. I really had to learn it the hard way. But i learned a lot and it was worth the hussle.

Thanks Slackware and everyone involved.

Slackware was the first linux distribution that I was able to install when I was younger probably... 18 years ago or so. Crazy to think about.

My very first Linux distribution, Slackware 2.0.

Our ways have parted, but it is nice to still see it around.

Happy Birthday and kudos to all those that still keep it alive.

My evolutions.

RedHat4 (not RHEL, ~1998), Slackware, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Debian

Honestly, cut my teeth on Slack - loved it, but now debian is my mainstay.

Happy Birthday!

I used Slackware only for a short while before moving to FreeBSD, but I really loved its simplicity back then!

my home servers are quite happy running slackware. they just keep doing their job without drama.

Thank you Patrick and co.

Slackware was such a relief after downloading boot.tgz and root.tgz to build your own linux system.

Never used it directly but Unraid is based on it, thanks Slackware!

that is since 1.00 -- I think I started using it at slackware ~0.7

Still on Slackware, no plans to use anything else as my main OS. I haven't used it continuously but I keep coming back. Slackware is Linux; everything else is mostly UI bling and attempted vendor lock.

Happy memories

Congrendulates, Slackware.

I still have 4CDs of Slackware 3.6. I was in high school when I first tried it, and I remembered all the complications of getting a PCI Winmodem working in Linux.

When I started university, I had a P3 667Mhz that booted Windows 98, Windows 2000, Slackware and BeOS 5. It used the BeOS bootloader because it was the most colorful.