No systemd for one thing. Arch is a rolling release but Slackware only updates things when necessary.
If you are adventurous, you can run slackware-current. It is “not” recommended, but is also pretty stable if you want a bleeding edge Slackware experience.
Yes, current is closely the equivalent of a rolling distro. Its still more stable than other OS's which start with a W
It's still around. Stable is 15.0 and still maintained by Patt!
Why would I use slackware over something like arch?
Traditional Unix like approach, stability, nice community. But, it would depend on what you want and look for in an OS. Arch is good too.
It always will be so long as Pat maintains it, I stopped using it years ago though. It lost its way trying to compete with Desktop OSes, and pretty much Arch replaced that niche, now we have Artix, Void and Alpine.
I do like the approach of 64 bit packages only. Serperating my other programs to conty for say my gamings, to keep my system clean. I did not try creating a vm, as there is a documentation to create kvm/ qemu virt manager , so that will be something i look forward to try so i can just gpu passthrough with slackware as the host.
This, with the prevalence of containers, slackware has the edge as a stable host system. Even slackware + nixpkg is pretty interesting.
That's how I've been managing the last little bit after going back to Slackware. Good stable combination.
Why would I use slackware over something like arch?
If you want something like Arch, but stable.
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