Hello again, Slackware…

After a year on CRUX as my main system, I made the decision to move back to Slackware. I really hope that such a long gap between releases will not happen again. I have several reasons for that, outlined below.

Let me start by saying that I absolutely love how CRUX is organized. It is simple, stays true to the KISS principle and the package management tools are excellent. It’s extremely easy to roll your own ports and make ports or packages repositories. I did have fun with that. The community at IRC is small, but very competent and helpful. On several occasions I had some trouble with a port or two, and someone would even make a patch for me.

However, there are a few things that turn out to be not to my liking:
1. The pace. CRUX is a semi-rolling release, meaning that there are constant updates all the time. After each update something may break, so time goes into rebuilding packages or searching for patches, because something may not build against the newer version of a dependency. Inkscape and poppler come to mind. Eventually I got tired of it
2. Due to the pace of CRUX, at some point I realized that maybe not everything in the ports repo was guaranteed to build anymore. In these cases, I would make my own port and solve the problem.
3. Maybe I was spoiled by Slackware, but on several occasions certain CRUX packages had issues, such as broken symlinks or dependencies listed, but their ports missing.
4. No precompiled kernel. Configuring a kernel by myself goes a bit beyond my competence, but this is not CRUX’s fault of course. I just used a config file from Slackware, which made me think that I was still indirectly dependent on it.

So, for a while now, I am taking a break from CRUX, but we’ll see how things go… Slackware 15.0 is released and I am slowly taking up maintenance of my SlackBuilds where I left off.