10 Years of Using Slackware

This year marks 10 years of using Slackware. My first connection with Slackware started when i bought my first laptop, Acer Travelmate. At that time, i was a Mandrake/Mandriva user and i love it. I have been using Mandrake/Mandriva since 2002 and i also joined the localization project of Mandrake/Mandriva and got a VIP status as well. It worked well on my desktop, so when i got my laptop, i wanted to use it.

Unfortunately, it didn't work well on my laptop. It installed perfectly, but when i rebooted it always end up with a kernel panic. Since i need an OS inside the laptop, i decided to try other Linux distribution at that time. I had plenty of choices, but most of them failed to be installed. The only Linux distribution that worked at that time was Slackware 10.2. I decided to install and use Slackware as my main OS even though i never use it before and i had no idea what Slackware was.

In just short time, i decided to stick with -current and since then, i'm always following -current development branch, thus i don't need to reinstall again everytime new version gets released. During my journey, i learned about third party repositories and eventually SlackBuilds project. I started as a user and my first contribution to SlackBuild was in 2010 (5 years ago). This is my first commit and it was guvcview. I met many people during my journey with Slackware, SlackBuilds, LQ, and many other communities around Slackware. I also founded ID-Slackware community and many people gathered around. I never thought we have a lot of Slackware users in Indonesia. Nowadays, we have more than 500 members in our mailing list and the number keep growing.

On March 2013, i joined Chess Griffin to work on MATE Desktop SlackBuild project (MSB) project. It was a great project and i still maintain that project (we are hoping to get MATE 1.10 released this year). In late 2013 (around November), i was asked by Robby to join as SlackBuilds admins and i accepted. It was an honor to join with the rest of the admins such as Robby Workman, Eric Hameleers, Erik Hanson, Matteo Bernardini, Niels Horn, Heinz Wiesinger, David Somero, Michiel van Wessem, and others.

On April 2014 i started my CSB (Cinnamon SlackBuild) project and so far i'm pleased with the result. I'm planning to release a new version of CSB when next Slackware has been released due to unsatisfied dependencies which limit my effort to bring newer version to -stable users.

In 2015, we have passed over 5000 scripts in SlackBuilds project, which is an amazing milestone. We hope to achive 6000 this year. Big thanks to all maintainers who actively maintain and submit more packages to ease other Slackware users who wanted to install packages not provided by Slackware official repository.

It's been a great 10 years of great Slackware experience and i'm still loving it. Hopefully we will see another great release of Slackware (probably 14.2) from Patrick this year.