Dig Deeper Community Forum

I just upgraded to slackware-current and it hit me again. Linux distros just seem low effort, almost broken by default. I'm going to drop all my complaints here before I forget what they were:

- Thunar is a default file manager in the XFCE edition of Slackware. Not only is it basically unfeatured (I'm going to skip this because this is pretty subjective), but by default it didn't show my veracrypted SD card. Usually I'd figure the SD card has been destroyed or something. But no, it mounts normally from CLI - thunar just doesn't care about veracrypted devices. Very big oversight to me. Old SpaceFM does show them.

- Compiling Claws Mail claims to require libetpan > 0.57. I've installed Libetpan 1.9 and it still claims that and fails to compile (1.9 is higher than 0.57 unless I forgot math?). I've settled on not compiling and just using a ready package, which brought on another annoyance, namely that it requires a bunch of old libs like nettle or whatever. Why does new nettle not contain all the functionality of old nettle? I had to install two different versions of the same lib, and slackware package managers make this annoying to do.

- To remove packages, slackpkg needs some GPG keys updated or whatever. Why? It's just removing. I am not doing anything with the repos.

- Entire OS is pulseaudio dependent. Even compiling psi-plus needs it. Smplayer won't run without it. Don't trust the internet who will say "based apulse fixes it!" because it actually doesn't. Pipewire is also a default. I used to ride alsa only, what changed?

- I did make xfce 4.12 work...but I had to fiddle with permissions on certain files and stuff. I'm not sure this is safe and should be needed...

- Everything moved on to gtk 3 and 4. Subjective but important to me. This also makes customization much harder if you want to roll your own GTK theme. Though not entirely Slackware's fault; every dev other than a handful just moved on.

- Completely nondescript or even misleading errors are the bread and butter of Linux. Like claiming that pyOpenSSL doesn't exist instead of that it is too old or too new. Or even worse examples like "ImportError: /usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/glib/_glib.so: undefined symbol: PyUnicodeUCS2_DecodeUTF8". What am I supposed to do with that? No wonder people use AI to fix their tech problems today.

- GUI programs never really tell you what's going on under the hood. This has been my complaint for like all the time I've been using Linux. Errors usually only appear if you run it from terminal. XFCE menus don't even tell you what is the name of the program you are running (the "about" page should show the actual name of the binary, but it doesn't).

- Slackware seems big into having an "official system" based on only the stuff in the newest repo. Other distros follow the same philosophy AFAIK. The setup that has stuff from different repos is considered "broken". I hate this notion, I think Linux exists to be customised to the user's wishes. If you can't do that, how is it any different than Windows? And I know you *can* do that, but again, package managers etc. make it unwieldy.

- Current slapt-get is actually worse than the one from 15. When you give it multiple packages to install, and one doesn't exist (or is mistyped, etc) it will not install any, instead of all but the wrong one...

- I won't even talk about the shitty software defaults like Firefox, Konqueror, a million different window managers, terminal emulators no one is actually going to use. But again pretty subjective.

- Slackware is still considered a "boomer distro" but it's wrong. It keeps following the newest conventions like elogind, networkmanager, pulse, pipewire is somehow a default (why when there is already pulse?). KDE is also a default DE on the live iso, and it's extremely slow.

- The OS starts in runlevel 4 meaning it runs some shitty graphical login manager automatically. I hate it, it's so ugly. And killing it just restarts it. Please start me in the CLI if you're such a boomer distro...

- Anything that requires qmake to compile, won't do so by default and will say qmake does not exist. This is because qt binaries are not automatically added to the execution path (which is /usr/lib64/qt5/bin... why are binaries being put into a "lib" folder???). Another oversight that could have been easily fixed if anyone gave a shit.

- Oh I almost forgot. The XFCE version doesn't handle multiple monitors properly. And by multiple monitors I mean simply connecting an outside screen to a laptop. Everything ends up on the laptop monitor, all the icons, panels, etc... Disabling the laptop display also kills X (lol).

- Lilo is crap, the TUI installer doesn't support multiple kernels, it also has nondescript errors while booting, is hard to fix, etc. Maybe grub is better but I never bothered to learn it, and lilo is default.

More might be added later but I think I got most of the important ones. How is it in your distro? Is this slackware specific and should I move? Or is Linux just not that good actually?

Oh, and almost all of these criticisms apply to the "stable" Slackware 15 too.

i haven't thought about linux distros in a while since alpine just works on my web browsing laptop (this one) but unfortunately i'm looking to want to switch from (O)bsd to linux for some better performance and slightly better drivers (it's a 2-in-1 device, thinking of gentoo). i realize i don't really like the wild jungle of distros and i got pretty lucky to settle on something with saneish defaults... which i fucked up and tried to fix after installing a desktop environment (xfce) as well, and all the software with it. linux desktop developers (and especially desktop software devs, eww) seem to have some sort of problems... mainly due to lack of resources and hands seeing how it compares to server development (most companies are here for the server side of loonix, not desktop), but more often they have something up their ass and can be rather dense (read: have different priorities such as being cutting-edge (removing compatibility, such as QT, ew) or something more political than that). it's all handled pretty poorly.
i have some similar issues to you:

- it's not that uncommon for Thunar to occasionally crash, even with so few tabs open.
- Thunar and external devices are fine... except for using internal hard drives most of the time. veracrypted ones don't even show, opposed to other distros i've used.

- i feel the switch from musl is quite a bit more restrictive package-wise, until you get a compatibility layer for glibc. i'm unsure, but i think even afterwards, this ends up causing some compatibility or performance issues
- this also means compiling from scratch can be a bit of a hassle too thanks to all the dependencies (which you may also have to compile).

- having to update the monolithic kernel every time for new packages and drivers to work while unintentionally submitting to any other side effects is a bit of a hassle.

i came across a decent article covering the incompetence on linux desktop development (from the viewpoint of "average joes"), but unlike another article, like the one from the whonix guy, at least he's able to show that all current choices aren't perfect and have really bad flaws instead of just shilling windows as the always better choice. it covers a lot of great points i also share, like the lag of a good equivalent to task manager
i also came to the realization of how much linux sucks to deal with, the fragmentation of the community (who would usually reach out to for help) and quarreling within it, everything and everyone has different visions, which is less of a problem within more autistic alternative OSes, such as the BSDs, which while it serves the communities better, ends up with them being less competent for desktop usage due to less support, despite the passion.
i ended up sacrificing quite a bit from the switch to windows, some i think that was necessary (most modern games are pretty poor and worthless, though even some visual novels coded in some odd software doesn't run well through wine), but i think some ended up killing some passions. audio is a really bad issue on linux, and is probably one of the main reasons i've focused on music production less (i still have windows on desktop to use fl studio and the projects i have on there, though i should look into renoise).
it's given me more experience with the technical side (and will continue to give me more), but that's culminated on finding out almost every piece of software is, pretty shit. x.org sucks, web browsers suck, email clients suck, the 'task managers' in linux suck, all desktop environments especially suck, file managers suck... so many things that could be fixed if people really put effort, care and polish into software in general, but software dev culture and requirements have ruined good software.

Something funny happened literally just now:

>try to install qbittorrent
>package description claims it's a qt5 program
>I slapt-get it
>dep list includes qt6

digdeeper wrote: Tue Jun 16, 2026 7:01 am - Compiling Claws Mail claims to require libetpan > 0.57. I've installed Libetpan 1.9 and it still claims that and fails to compile (1.9 is higher than 0.57 unless I forgot math?).

Bonus: when a package requires for example LibX-dev, but you have LibX-devel installed, which is literally same package but differenetly named.

Linus talked about this issue way back in 2014, and things still bad.

Take some Mints.