As the title says, I am a refugee from the "systemd plague" - quite probably, not the first nor the last. I can't really stand the vanilla Slackware (reasons below), so I looked for a Slackware-based distro which does not differentiate much from Slackware, but addresses its main flaws. After trying a few disros on a spare laptop, I ended up with Salix, and it turns out it is exactly what I was looking for. Excellent distro, very good work, Salix developers! No wonder Salix is generally praised in the distro reviews.
Long story follows, with a few remarks and questions.
I switched to Linux back in 1999, and never turned back to Window$. After a short passage from RedHat (which I didn't like), and a longer one in Mandrake waters, I "settled" at Debian around 2002, mainly because of its excellent packaging management. I also tried Slackware in the meantime, and I liked it, but I also hated the total lack of any dependency checking. I just don't get it, despite the fact many Slackers actually praise it as a "feature".
I dislike bloated systems, so I prefer to start with a minimal installation, then add only the packages I really need. While it is perfectly possible to do that in Slackware, it is a real pain in the butt (I did it once and will never do it again). The other option is to install everything (Slackare installer even recommends to do so). But I refuse to do that; I don't see why the heck I have to install everything just to ensure dependencies for the packages I really need are met. It doesn't make any sense to install everything including, e.g., an Apache server, grub (while lilo is used), or Japanese/Mongol fonts - things I will never use. Yes, I can select all packages, then pick the "expert" option and deselect the packages I don't need. But that's also a pain, not to mention I can't know what every single package does, so in many cases I can't tell if I need it or not. For those reasons, although Slackware is a respectable distro, it never made it to my main computer. Luckily, Salix solves that issue. You guys call Salix a distro for "lazy Slackers", but I call it "common sense".
Quite some time ago, Debian decided to fall in the systemd trap. I dislike systemd for many reasons, including its monolithic nature (far from being just an init service), has binary logs (for god's sake, binary logs!), and it is extremely intrusive. The list goes on, not to mention I can't stand or trust its main developer (a quick look in his posts will suffice). Recently, Debian officially adopted systemd even in the "stable" version of the distro, making dodging systemd way harder than before. This was the end for my Debian days, after ~13 years using it. Slackware came in mind, and Salix was one of the distros I tried. It is also the one I settled.
Salix installation went very well, with a few surprises - most of them pleasant ones. I picked the "minimal graphical installation" - a pleasant surprise by itself, and a thing that should be in Slackware years ago. I picked that option as a first test, just to see what Salix will do. It turned out Salix wasn't joking: what I got was a really minimal installation, with a graphical (Xfce) environment that worked out-of-the-box (although I had to set my Radeon GPU in xorg, as the vesa driver is picked by default). Salix did exactly as I said - for the first time in my Linux years I didn't get a "bloated" installation despite what I asked, and there was no need to reinstall a minimal, non-graphical system, then install a window manager to avoid useless stuff installed by default. Of course, not everybody thinks of "minimal" as I do, so I had to uninstall a few things that Salix included in the "minimal graphical" installation (most notably gdm), and I also had to install a few others that I expected to be there already (e.g., xpdf).
I don't need a display manager so I got rid of gdm. Gslapt uninstalled gdm as I asked, but I expected it to set my default startlevel to 3, or to tell me that I have to do that manually. Instead of that, gslack went "the Slacky way", doing nothing. Nothing serious, as everyone who uninstalls all display managers is supposed to know what he is doing and should edit /etc/inittab after that. However, it might be frustrating for some people. I understand Salix is not "I can't configure Slackware" (what Ubuntu is for Debian). And I'm glad it's not that, but such small things could drive some people away from a great distro.
After installation, and being new to the distro, I installed the packages I wanted using gslapt (although in the Debian world I never used Synaptic in favor of aptitude). Gslapt did a very good job - at last, dependency maintenance for Slackers! I also used Sourcery (awesome name, by the way), which did what I expected it to do. I tried to install, e.g., "Worker" (my favorite file manager), and Sourcery found it but told me I need to install p7zip first; it waited for me to do that with glsapt, with a button to "try again" once p7zip is installed. After that, it downloaded, compiled, and installed Worker, which was ready to use (and present in the menus immediately).
All in all, a very smooth package management. It's not apt-get/aptitude, but it's quite close to that.
A few remarks concerning installation/use; note that all of them are far from being serious issues:
(1) xfs file system is the default filesystem in Salix (in contrast to Slackware or Slackel). Nothing wrong with that. However, if I pick the more common ext4 filesystem everything works, but I get two warnings during early booting: the kernel complains that ext2 and ext3 are not supported. Nothing serious by any means, just annoying. I guess Salix's kernel is tweaked or somehow the system really loves xfs? In any case, I reinstalled Salix picking xfs this time, and the warning messages are not there anymore.
(2) After installation, I tried to switch to the stripped, "generic" kernel for faster booting, but, to my surprise, the only kernel in the /boot directory is the "huge" one. This is quite different than Slackware. The generic kernel is marked in gslapt but it's not there. I guess it's not there for a reason, and since playing with the kernel is not a very wise thing, I decided to ask about that first.
(3) Salix doesn't want the user to login as root, and encourages going "the sudo way" (which is a good thing). However, i expected it to ask me for a root password anyway. The option to set the root password is present in the corresponding installation menu, but if you forget to set it, go figure what's the root password on your own system - quite frustrating.
(4) Traces of Slackware's "install them all you need them or not" philosophy are still there. For example, I installed cmake and, to my surprise, the corresponding package also installed the useless graphical front-end of cmake, which in turn installed qt libraries; I expected a "cmake-cli" and a "cmake-x" package, but they are all-in-one. Many packages are like that. I understand this is a Slackware-based distro though, and I don't expect Salix developers to repackage everything in a more convenient way.
(5) Some packages available via Sourcery won't compile, and it's not always easy to figure out what went wrong. For example, Maxima is in Salix's repos but it won't compile because of a rather poor makefile - it assumes the lisp compiler is in /usr/lib/sbcl, while it is actually in /usr/lib64/sbcl. A simple symlink or, even better, a small change in the makefile will make it work. Other packages, such as LyX, won't compile but it's not that easy to fix the problem. I just hope I will be able to contribute some fixes in that domain soon.
Well, that's all for now. This turns to be a long post - sorry for that.
Again, congratulations to the Salix developers, they really did a great job! I am not a "distro-hopper" and I guess I'll settle in Salix's waters for good... Unless Slackware 15 turns to be a systemd-infested distro, as many others did - in which case Salix would have to follow, I am afraid... Let's just hope that won't happen.
