Arch vs. Slackware, a friendly comparison

“By “getting your hands dirty”, I mean there’s a lot of manual
configuration file editing, not a lot of GUI friendliness, and lots
of terminals. Eventually you’ll get the system set up with a nice
GUI; both Slack and Arch officially support KDE—Arch also
officially supports GNOME which is easily available for Slack via
third parties.

“Why would you subject yourself to this? Answer: because you’ll
learn a lot about how the system works, and when it breaks, you’ll
be much better-prepared to fix it.

“The irony of the user-friendly systems is that the layers of
user-friendliness are by necessity layers of complexity. The
systems are offloading the tasks of system management from the
relatively smart super-powerful human brains and moving it onto a
relatively stupid piece of complex and fragile system management
software. (I’d argue that the reason these pieces of management
software are fragile and complex is that historically Unix systems
were administered by humans, and they weren’t built with
“fire-and-forget” machine administration in mind, but that’s a
story for another time.)”

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