Because it remains logical and stays honest. Because it stays mine.
It doesn’t assume. It doesn’t obscure. It doesn’t interfere.
And that is rare.
I don’t use Slackware because it’s challenging.
I use it because it doesn’t lie to me.
Because in a landscape increasingly shaped by abstraction and automation, learning is a choice—and a responsibility.
Valid simplicity isn’t the absence of complexity, but the removal of unnecessary intricacy.
Understanding your system means comprehending yourself—the way you work, the way you solve problems, and the way you think about technology.
A well-built system does not shield you from its internals—it exposes them, allowing control instead of illusion.
Knowing your init system isn’t an afterthought; it defines how your machine boots, how processes spawn, how services behave.
Running ldd on a binary isn’t an act of paranoia; it’s ensuring nothing unexpected has crept into your environment.
Tracing syscalls with strace isn’t an academic exercise; it’s peeling away abstraction to see how software truly operates beneath the surface.
A package manager shouldn’t resolve dependencies for you—it should resolve them with you.
The deeper you go, the more Slackware makes sense.
Because understanding is power.
Because transparency is trust.
Slackware isn’t just software. It’s a mindset.
Automation may dominate mainstream computing, but Slackware stands apart—deliberate, precise, and unapologetically manual.
Nothing is abstracted. Every interaction is intentional, and under your control.
You execute mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/media, not because automounting is unavailable, but because device control belongs to you—not delegated to a background daemon.
You launch startx manually, not due to a lack of display managers, but because no assumptions are made about what should start, when, or how.
You configure rc.inet1.conf by hand, not because tooling is absent, but because tools remain passive—present, but inert—until explicitly invoked.
Slackware embodies the KISS principle in its purest form.
Complexity isn’t disguised as convenience. Layers of abstraction aren’t imposed without necessity.
The system remains simple, yet powerful—revealing control, never hiding mechanics.
In Slackware, automation is elective. Control is absolute.
No unseen orchestration. No silent substitutions. No decisions made on your behalf.
What you run is what executes. What you modify is what changes.
And that clarity has endured.
Where other systems adapt reactively—absorbing complexity, reinventing solutions with every update—Slackware remains steady.
The same scripts that governed it decades ago still work today.
Its package management is consistent and predictable, free of opaque dependency solvers or self-imposed chaos.
Slackware does not assume. It does not automate beyond necessity. It does not dictate workflows.
It offers the essentials—the kernel, the shell, the tools—and leaves the rest to you.
No background services launching without your knowledge. No default daemons overriding your intent. No pressure to adopt temporary technologies.
It is not just a distribution. It is a living tradition—one that values ownership over automation, knowledge over assumption, and choice over convenience.
While modern systems accelerate toward abstraction, Slackware holds its ground.
It remembers what computing used to mean—and keeps that memory alive.