Anyone old enough to remember using v1.0?
this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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3.something in the late 90's for me. I remember thinking their version jump from 4.0 to 7.0 was the stupidest thing ever.
Slackware was my first distro I ever properly used.
That 4-7 thing was really kind of funny at the time. There were so many version number purists then ... major.minor.patch is the rule, and don't you dare do anything but! Slackware is sitting there looking at Redhat and Mandrake and going: "what if we release version 7 -- maybe we can trick people into switching!" or something.
Well, the t-shirt above is also from an arbitrary version number. Slackware released 13.0, 13.1, 13.2, 13.37 cause it was funny.
Now with git and rolling releases, I think people would be less mad. Hell, even windows 7->8->10 happened.
This is a very fun chart: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Distribution_Timeline.svg -- slackware looks very impressive there -- the longest lived old distro -- and even Suse can (partially) trace its heritage to slackware. But, excluding Suse (and its derivatives), Slackware probably has less than 1% of the linux market share.
Actually, that chart probably explains the current redhat saga -- look how many derivatives have spawned over the years! Imagine you could halt that process...
I too started with Slackware 3. Downloaded a billion disks from a BBS over a 14.4 modem. It was definitely an improvement over my previous experience of accidentally downloading Minix in Portuguese. That is a hard way to learn an OS or a language, let alone both simultaneously.
Minix! I actually went so far as to track down a copy of minix on Usenet and bought it, complete with floppy disks. But before I got around to installing it Linux became available, and I never got around to it. Can't even imagine trying to install it in a foreign language. (It would be foreign for me anyway)