Salix OS - A Powerful and Simple Slackware Distro

I've wanted to take a look at some Slackware based distros for a while now, and now that Summer has ended it's time to do just that, starting with Salix.
Salix is an interesting distro that offers all the power and stability of Slackware, but its footprint is much smaller than a full Slackware install and, here's the thing, it adds dependency management into the mix.
This is what sets Salix apart. Package management is as simple as it is on the likes of ubuntu, especially when using the gslapt gui. Add the ability to use flatpaks and slackbuilds into the mix and you soon start to see
what a great little system this really is.
I hope you enjoy the video :-)
For those interested in using the polywins script it can be found here:
github.com/tam-carre/polywins
If you enjoy my channel and/or find it useful, you can support me in a number of ways.
1. If you would like to become a Patron, my page is here:
/ oldtechbloke
2. If you would like to order OTB merchandise, I now have a Spreadshirt shop and a Teespring shop:
shop.spreadshirt.co.uk/oldtec...
teespring.com/stores/otbs-sto...
3. if you want to buy me a beer, I've now launched my new website and you'll find a PayPal button for that very purpose:
www.oldtechbloke.com
If you chose any of the above options you will be helping to keep the channel going and I am extremely grateful.
You can also join me on the following:
To join LBRY please click the link below. As a disclaimer, I will earn LBRY points if you use the link so thanks for the support
lbry.tv/$/invite/@oldtechbloke:8
To join the OldTechBloke Facebook group click here:
/ oldtechbloke
To join the OldTechBloke subreddit click here:
/ oldtechbloke
To view my GitLab repo:
gitlab.com/OldTechBloke
Ramble On!

[@slackware14.25]

I haven't logged into my youtube account for 8 months, but because it's you, salckware and salix I'm logging in to support you.

[@antuelle78]

Welcome back, hope you had a good rest

[@ArniesTech]

Slackware is a real OG distro that gets way too little attention 💪🙏

[@TheExileFox]

It was fun to try alongside Ubuntu when I went to a tech college back in (autumn) 2006-2009 (summer)

[@peterjansen4826]

It is a great distro but it also is a fragile distro at this very moment because it still depends too much on one person. I understood that they are working on making certain that the distro will not die when he would fall away which is good to know. I wish Slackware the best and I want it to compete strongly with Arch.

[@TheEzemikedirnt]

I'm glad you're making videos when you feel like making them...for a long time now I've been seeing several channels about Linux where there isn't much to explore and they repeat topics or say things that don't even deserve two minutes of video. I also like your style of commenting and telling us what you're up to apart from talking about linux, I'm not going to try salix because you already made me install slackware lol your videos were very helpful. greetings from Argentina!

[@RobBoudreau]

Nice to see you again Steve, even without the hat. 😁

[@kriskruz3792]

Nice to see you back Sir! Enjoyed this one.

[@grugiv]

Only a quarter of the way through the video so far, but I am loving this.

[@2u263]

Glad to see you making essential videos, be well friend and thank you & you're missed. I've been distro hopping this yr. having landed on antiX for my laptop, after having to build new boxes & had trouble installing slackware15 on the new hardware🤣

[@ajax321]

It's good to have you back OTB! Salix seems like a decent distro, I'll probably play with it in a vm or something.

[@folksurvival]

It's great.

[@marioschroers7318]

Welcome back, sir! Hope you enjoyed your marvelous bike during summer (Royal Enfield, wasn't it?). Great to see new content. I remember you contemplating the future of the channel. For sure, you're free to act to your heart's content; just letting you know that your audience appreciates you.

[@themroc8231]

Good to see you back. I thought you'd come back more tanned from riding the bike on those summer roads. I haven't used Salix in a while, but i remember it being really nice.

[@davidrichardson2513]

Thanks, very interesting. Been using Salix for a week or two now but still learnt from your video. All good. Believe this may give me more confidence to try pure Slackware once more. Thanks again.

[@rdglinux]

Very nice video!! After seeing your Salix review, I have installed spkg and slapt-get from Salix on Slackware 15 (the two respective txz files from a and ap directories, respectively). It works perfectly on Slackware! Binary software installation in slackware has never been so easy. Thank you very much for your always excellent Slackware videos!

[@rdglinux]

Addition: salix binary repository is huge. Very nice 👍

[@kennyp6622]

Looking good hatless

[@chrissoskavounis4307]

Great video for a great distro! The fastest xfce!!! Thank you!

[@zeppy13131]

Splendid review, mate! Helpful, too, as I'm considering switching to this distro and am glad to see the actual install process. My only reservation is that Gslapt doesn't organize packages by category... That'd be a good addition. But I suppose other package managers can be used too. Thanks 'n' cheers!

[@mikael2313]

R.I.P Steve 😕

[@holyhelga]

it used to be that way on all distros before systemd came out

[@johanb.7869]

Light shines on marble head, lol🤣So Salix is more for a Slackware beginner? I really like the background it comes with.

[@folksurvival]

I was hoping you would cover this distro.

[@ArniesTech]

I am amazed that the Slackware family tree is sought after 💪😎

[@folksurvival]

@@ArniesTech Why?

[@ArniesTech]

@@folksurvival because Slackware seems to fall behind in terms of popularity and attention. While in fact it is a major relic from the past living on to this very day. 🙏

[@supertouk]

having flatpak installed and configured out of the box is nice. I've tried installing and setting it up on slackware and it is a chore. I like the way that salix does that. I have to say though, that one thing that I miss is IPP printing. Linix mint 21 does this out of the box so I am not sure if this is tied to systemd or not, but it would be a nice addition to salix and slackware.

[@breadmoth6443]

Salix is great for what it is, but I am ok with just Slackware - but I do also wish at some point the option to install GRUB to be put in the installer would be a good idea.

[@JeffWaynee]

Salix used to have many flavors, but it seems that now its only available with Xfce out of the box.

[@OldTechBloke]

You can I install mate from the repos and plasma from slackware

[@theshowmanuk]

@@OldTechBloke Oh that's good I much prefer mate to xfce.

[@Redyf]

Your videos are great, can you make a vid about how to install dwm on nixOS?

[@DeepakKumar-cw1df]

weeks and i've managed to put so pretty basic soft together. They're not great and they still have a ways to go before being

[@Bruces-Eclectic-World]

Awesome video OTB... I'm not a Slacker in the terms of the video, although, I have been accused of being one a time or two in my 68 years of being on Gods green earth. 🤣 This is interesting at a New To Slack User aspect the way I see it. Like with all new OS systems you need to learn how to use it. Arch, Ubuntu, Slack they all have there way of doing things and making the system working. For some the Fun is learning and getting it working, while for others not so much the learning, they just want it to work as easy as they can with little effort. This approach Salix OS seams to be geared towards the folks that want to give Slack ago just for fun. Hell I kinda like it and I'm not a Slack user nor have I plan to (be)... It could be enough to change folks minds and give it a go... Thanks OTB for the video! Sorry that summer bike is over for ya. Here in Indiana it is fall, while I like the cooler weather, I do dislike the brown and dying colors of winter coming. :-( LLAP 🖖

[@peterjansen4826]

I was rather distracted while reading your comment because I can only think: "want to pet dog".

[@peterjansen4826]

I love both spring and autumn and I actually enjoy the brown/yellow/red colors. Don't see it as dying, see it as the start of life. Leaves falling off makes all the nutrients go to the parts of the tree which lives on, the nutrients of those leaves end up in the soil feeding the tree later. As for the weather, I am not made for temperatures above 20 degrees Celsius. I love the cooler temperatures, I have sit inside with 17 degrees C in my T-shirt in the last weeks and it was perfectly comfortable for me.

[@Bruces-Eclectic-World]

​@@peterjansen4826 That is Old Buster. He was alive when I started this channel in his honor. He past away on 12/10/2021, he was 17 years old. He could not walk anymore, Bless his old Red Heart! He did try as that was the only real issue besides he could not hunch over to poop, which was the issue... It has been 299 days and I miss him as much today as I did when he passed at the vets office. 😢 My other dog Tip is just now starting to be himself again. It has been hard on both of us this year. 😥 Thanks for noticing him, I'm sure is happy about that! 🐕 LLAP 🖖🐶🐕

[@Bruces-Eclectic-World]

@@peterjansen4826 HaHAHA... I like the colors and all. After 68 years, I'm just a little tired of cold and snow... Lol If it staid 20C year round I would be happy and out in the yard more. Can't take the heat anymore... 🙂 LLAP 🖖

[@kychemclass5850]

If Salix is backwards compatible with Slackware, I'd have thought that doesn't necessarily mean Slackware is (forwards) compatible with Salix.

[@donaldmickunas8552]

Hmmm….interesting. I truly love Slackware but I don’t like having to do full installs. That’s just me, of course. So, Salix may be a solution for me. It depends on whether or not I can avoid Slackbuilds since that is the potential issue. The other consideration is that Slackware, when fully installed, seems to have all of the required dependencies for just about any GitHub compile. I don’t know that I want to give that up. So, I’m conflicted at the moment. The fact that my current Slackware install is rock solid stable makes me hesitate further. Anyway, great video. I always enjoy your videos. I hope you had a great summer. Take care and God bless.

[@OldTechBloke]

Thanks Donald. Salix did impress me but I will be sticking with my standard full Slackware installs

[@donaldmickunas8552]

@@OldTechBloke I don’t blame you. I might try Salix in a VM. Who knows?

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

I started off on Linux with Slackware in 1997 but as a confirmed Gentoo user since 2003, I hadn't touched it until you started making videos on it recently. I must admit that I was keen on trying 32-bit Slackware on some old Thinkpads I have because of the time it takes to update Gentoo on them - so I gave Slackware 15.0 a try on both of them only to discover after installation that neither of them would boot because of some installation problem. Fortunately, I had kept the old (but outdated) Gentoo installations on both laptops and just went back and upgraded those - I wonder if the 32-bit version of Slackware has enough attention paid to it because I don't hear about many problems on the 64-bit version. I was eager to be (re)impressed by Slackware but ended up disappointed with the experience, at least the 32-bit experience.

[@peterjansen4826]

The 7950X is a pretty sweet CPU for the price. That might be one for you, compiling faster for Gentoo. :p

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

@@peterjansen4826 I am not really interested in new hardware to be honest, but thanks for the recommendation. I don't even own a Ryzen currently, I think the most recent AMD CPU i have in a machine is an FX-8350 and that does fine for what I need. I gave up on AAA gaming about 10 years ago just because of the complete and utter cr*p being churned out since then (the single exception being Fallout 4 in 2015). I also don't do any video editing or have any heavy graphics processing requirements. In other words, I don't need the latest CPUs or graphics cards. I enjoy making custom Gentoo builds on older hardware, especially IBM and Lenovo Thinkpads, and putting those older machines to work as much as possible.

[@peterjansen4826]

@@terrydaktyllus1320 My point is that compiling with Gentoo takes a long time, especially with old CPU's and low-core CPU's. It keeps amazing me that so many Gentoo-users seem to have low-performance-CPU's like an old Bulldozer or a quadcore Intel in a laptop. As long as the user likes it, great, but I will wait with it until I have a 16C Ryzen or better. :)

[@peterjansen4826]

@@terrydaktyllus1320 It is not entirely true that there are no good games being made anymore. Examples are Hollow Knight from 2017 and Cuphead from 2016. Undertale, Ori, lot of indies. There still are plenty of good games being made, you just have to look outside the AAA-publishers. Even among those there still are some good games (like Hitman and Tomb Raider) but also many bad ones or mediocre ones at best. Allegedly the latest Assassin's Creed and Far Cry games are good too but I can't play those on Linux. :/ Sonly published a few good games on Steam, including Horizon Zero Dawn, Gods of War, Spiderman and Uncharted4. I also play a lot of StarCraft2, I play old and new games, usually I buy games years after launch.

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

@@peterjansen4826 I don't wish to be rude but I find there are so many people on YT who always find "one more reason" not to actually do something that they claim they want to do - in your case, by the sound of it, actually trying Gentoo out. If and when you decide to try Gentoo is entirely up to you but it has been my main OS since 2003 and I run it on "any old cr*p". There's nothing stopping you giving it a try now, if that is what you want to do. Sure, there's a "meme" around Gentoo about compilation times (for the record, I don't subscribe to memes because nothing says "I can't think for myself" better than parroting something "clever" that someone else once said, but I digress) but that is easily got around by having multiple PCs around ("any old cheap or free cr*p) and having one compiling while the other is being used. I also have a reasonably good dual CPU Xeon server that can run "distcc" over the network as a "helper" for compilation. The fact that you consider a CPU to be "low-performance" and I do not is entirely subjective. I have a large number of machines "kicking around" anyway though even then the newest is probably a small HP mini PC with a 7th generation Core i5 in it. So I am not short of spare hardware if any computer I have is busy doing something else. For the record, I also do a lot of stuff with Raspberry Pi and other SBCs, all with Gentoo. I like working with limited hardware power and seeing what I can make it do. One of my favourite machines is an IBM Thinkpad T22 from about 2002 with a Pentium III CPU at 1GHz, 512MB RAM and a great keyboard - a couple of times a month I dig it out, SSH into my home server and write shell scripts with it whilst having email open in another desktop and and mpd music client in a third window. It is wonderful "distraction free" computing that takes me back to the days of BBSes and the first dial-up Internet for an "old bloke" that thinks the modern web, and modern AAA games, all completely suck.

[@anon_y_mousse]

Looks pretty good. I've always had a problem with the way Slackware handles dependencies, but I'm kind of lazy and don't update too often. And no, I will never automate updates. So this with the first thing I install being KDE looks like it might be a good fit. As for ELILO, I couldn't get that to work on my system. I've always liked LILO over Grub, so I figured ELILO would be great, but with UEFI garbage it wouldn't work, so I had to install Grub anyway. UEFI is kind of the bane of my existence. As for the pronunciation, who cares. I pronounce Linux as Lie-Nuhx, and I know how it's supposed to be pronounced, but I don't care. It's funny to see people be confused when I say it. Almost like pronouncing wood as wewd.

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

I see no point to UEFI if I have a choice of selecting "Legacy BIOS" on the machine. UEFI used to make a bit of a boot time speed difference when we were all using mechanical hard disks but with SSDs, the difference now between BIOS and UEFI is negligible. People always say that "BIOS is buggy" but the OS takes over very early in the boot process anyway so I've never experienced any real issues booting from BIOS. To me, UEFI and Secure Boot go "hand-in-hand" as creations that Microsoft had involvement in creating some years ago to keep Linux off of PCs - another reason why I avoid UEFI.

[@anon_y_mousse]

@@terrydaktyllus1320 Totally agreed. The computer I'm on now is a pre-built and it was a pain in the butt, to put it politely, just getting it to boot into the Live CD.

[@YurideGroot]

Why do you re-enable root? Do you not like using sudo?

[@OldTechBloke]

You can have both and sometimes I will just switch to root when I have several tasks to carry out

[@YurideGroot]

@@OldTechBloke thanks for a swift reply. You are right, they're not mutually exclusive. I guess I prefer to have the safety catch on until I line up my target, hence I prefer sudo. You obviously trust yourself to not make typos - more power to you. At least Linux lets each of us do it our way, and that's a good thing.

[@peterjansen4826]

Old tech bloke, I have a video-idea: using nixOS on Arch instead of using the AUR. How viable is it? Does every package get easily installed and can you find every package? The reason behind this idea: I noticed that the AUR has a lot of broken packages and I noticed that nixOS has a lot of packages, including many which are not in the Arch-repositories.

[@OldTechBloke]

I’m not sure it would work to be honest Peter but I’ll need to think that one through

[@peterjansen4826]

@@OldTechBloke According to the Archwiki you can do that.

[@peterjansen4826]

@Acid Bong Yeah, you are correct about that.

[@OldTechBloke]

Yes I’ve just been reading about it

[@donaldmickunas8552]

@@OldTechBloke oh oh, sounds like a new project in the offing. LOL. Have fun!

[@itsfish8672]

GVOTB.

[@stephanblack4558]

It looks like a windows 95 bios and install process.

[@d3stinYwOw]

Salix does not ship with grub, so chroot method won't work :)

[@OldTechBloke]

It would if you install grub as part of the process after setting up the chroot

[@d3stinYwOw]

@@OldTechBloke I'm in chroot right now in salix full install and there's nothing about grub unfortunately. On my 2nd laptop with salix full, when I use slapt-get --search grub, I get line with grub and [inst=no] instead of [inst=yes], so they don't ship grub at all, needs to be installed separately. In slackware, yes, it works, but not in Salix. They ship only elilo/lilo

[@OldTechBloke]

Cant you just do a slapt-get -i grub

[@d3stinYwOw]

@@OldTechBloke On running PC - of course, but when wanting to use on non EFI system BTRFS as root, without separate boot partition, it might not be that successful without internet connection :) That's why they have warning during install about BTRFS - grub is not on the ISO. I will make a bug ticket to them about shipping GRUB on their ISOs in the future

[@Sordis]

Не плохо так то.

[@holyhelga]

i belive how you pronounce the name depend on if your language is english or not

[@stephanblack4558]

I don't like the way it's locked all the time.