Allow me a noob moment, please.

[reyoutiao]

Hi, everyone. I'm diving into Salix, Arch, and Slackware right now, and just wanted to say: this Linux thing is hard!

Been reading a lot of Wikis and documentation and forum posts and sometimes it makes my head spin (like now). It is fun, though, when it feels like I'm making progress, and I believe the knowledge will be worthwhile and, hopefully, useful.

Right now, being able to do basic things like package management is what I'm aiming for.

Also, despite the (often superficial) reviews on the internet, Slack and Arch don't seem very alike to me at all. With pacman and a newer kernel that detects my wireless card out of the box, Arch seems significantly more automated, or convenient.

[gapan]

In my opinion, there is absolutely nothing similar about Slackware and Arch and I have no clue where this idea that they target the same audience comes from. Probably from people that know nothing about either Slackware or Arch.

If you're comparing Slackware and Arch and you find Arch more automated with pacman, I would have to agree. But if you're comparing Salix and Arch, it's a completely different story. Haven't you discovered slapt-get/gslapt yet?

Your problem with the wireless card, depending on how you look at it, is either because your hardware is too new or because the default kernel in Slackware/Salix is too old for it. In any case, it can be fixed by:
1. Installing newer kernel packages, or
2. Building a newer kernel yourself.

[Shador]

Also, despite the (often superficial) reviews on the internet, Slack and Arch don't seem very alike to me at all. With pacman and a newer kernel that detects my wireless card out of the box, Arch seems significantly more automated, or convenient.

That's the advantage of bleeding-edge. But what if you decide to pull in those few updates quickly and end up with a mess? Because it's so new, it's still bug. It's not a pleasure, if you're quite busy atm otherwise and require that machine. With Salix/Slackware there are much less updates and each of those fewer updates is less likely to break something.
On the other hand Arch benefits of course from a giant, extremely knowledgeable community. Therefor Arch wiki is one of the best resources on the net and they can offer a much bigger community package selection. There's just no competing with that manpower for us.

[djemos]

Also, despite the (often superficial) reviews on the internet, Slack and Arch don't seem very alike to me at all.Also, despite the (often superficial) reviews on the internet, Slack and Arch don't seem very alike to me at all.

Arch is a bleeding-edge distro. If you want to update your system every day then soon or later you will end up with a mess. If your purpose is to try new things then this is not a big problem. But if you use linux as a main productive system to do your everyday job and have critical things this is a big problem.
You want a stable system then use Slackware. If you want to play with it then use arch.

[reyoutiao]

Thanks, Gapan. I'm still trying to successfully upgrade the kernel. Haven't moved on to exploring slapt-get. The wireless is actually not that new, it's just kind of obscure. It wasn't supported natively in Ubuntu until 10.04, I believe.

Now that I've used them, they don't seem anything a like to me (Arch and Slack). But when I was researching them, there were many reviews that lump them together, sometimes with Gentoo, for comparison.

I do like the config files in Arch. They're very concise and straightforward.

The Slackware changelogs have seemed quite active recently. I know Slackware's released on a "when it's ready" basis, but do you think there will be a new version soon?

[gapan]

I do like the config files in Arch. They're very concise and straightforward.

Just like they are in Slackware/Salix.

The Slackware changelogs have seemed quite active recently. I know Slackware's released on a "when it's ready" basis, but do you think there will be a new version soon?

No idea.