Slackware, but pretty #1

// Slackware in 2026?! 🐧

Every time I post a screenshot of my desktop, sooner or later somebody asks the same question: “nice, is that Arch?”. No, it’s Slackware. The oldest Linux distribution still alive, the one people remember as “the hard one”, the one without dependency resolution, the one your friend used in 1999.

And yet here we are, with a Hyprland desktop where the colours follow the wallpaper, a custom shell with a drawer and a notification island, rofi menus for pretty much everything, and an old Android tablet turned into a stream deck. 😎

So I decided to write a series about it, one article a day. It’s a showcase, not a step by step tutorial: I’ll show you what each piece does, how it’s wired, and where to find the code. If you want to borrow something, every repository is linked, go ahead. 😉

// The myth of the “fancy” distro

There’s this idea floating around that if you want a good looking, modern desktop you need a distribution that’s “made for it”. Arch because it has everything in the AUR, Ubuntu because it’s polished out of the box, Fedora because it’s always on the latest GNOME, and so on.

Let’s look at what those distributions actually give you, though:

• Packages. A big repository, so the program you want is one command away.
• Defaults. Someone else already chose a theme, a panel, a notification daemon.
• Freshness. New versions of the toolkit and the compositor, early.

All good things, no doubt. But notice what’s missing from that list: the look. No distribution ships the desktop you see in the screenshots on r/unixporn. That’s configuration, scripts, a palette, a lot of evenings spent moving a margin by two pixels. And configuration doesn’t care which distribution it runs on. A QML file is a QML file, a rofi theme is a rofi theme, on Arch, on Ubuntu, on Slackware.

// What Slackware gives me instead

Slackware doesn’t hold your hand, and that’s exactly the point. A package is a tarball with a little script, no magic, nothing happening behind your back. When something breaks I can read why, and the system is so plain that it stays out of the way while I build on top of it.

“But the packages!”, I hear you say. Fair. Slackware’s official tree is small on purpose, so the rest comes from the community:

• SlackBuilds.org, the community repository of build scripts, which covers a surprising amount of software.
• My own package repository, built by an automated pipeline on a dedicated VM. I’ve written about it on the buildsystem page, and the packages are listed in the repository.
• Other Slackware users’ repositories. Hyprland and its whole family of tools, for example, come from slackware.lngn.net, maintained by another Slackware user. That’s how this community has always worked: someone needs something, builds it, and shares it. 🤝

So yes, it takes a bit more work than pacman -S. But it’s work you do once, and in exchange you know exactly what’s on your machine.

// What we’ll see in this series

Here’s the plan, one article a day:

1. Slackware in 2026?!, the one you’re reading 👋
2. Hyprland on Slackware, the foundation: where it comes from and how the configuration is organised
3. One palette to rule them all, the unified-desktop-theme (UDT): one palette, and an accent colour that follows the wallpaper
4. Cascading, how that palette reaches the terminal, conky, the login screen, GRUB, and even the lights in my apartment (and while I was at it, the keyboard and the TV) 💡
5. Keystone, my Quickshell components: the drawer, the island, notifications and a local assistant
6. rofi everywhere, the menus for power, apps, screenshots, SSH, passwords, emoji and more
7. deck-it, the old tablet that became a second monitor and a stream deck
8. The little helpers, small Qt tools like upscale-qt, and some closing thoughts

Every piece is a separate project, mostly small, and almost all of them are on my git server. None of them needs anything that Slackware doesn’t have.

// Up next

Tomorrow we start from the bottom: getting Hyprland running on Slackware, and why my whole configuration lives in a git repository.

See you on the next one 👋